Perfectly Normal
by Spoilers
Summary: After Journey's End, Rose realised she was immortal. Now she's trying to have a perfectly normal life with John Smith and their three children, in spite of their abilities, - and the constant fear that she will outlive her husband. Alt!10/Rose
1. Fixed Point in Time

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Doctor Who, the Doctor or the TARDIS (did you know the BBC actually trademarked the word TARDIS?)

**1: Fixed Point in Time**

As the sound of the TARDIS engines faded away from Bad Wolf Bay, the Doctor - now John Smith - turned to Rose Tyler and grinned.

"So," he said. "Life as a human!"

* * *

"I now pronounce you man and wife! You may kiss the bride."

John and Rose Smith were happy to oblige.

* * *

Later, they had a laugh about the vicar's phrasing, just the two of them.

"What would they have said if I'd married you as an alien?" grinned Rose. "Alien and wife? Time Lord and wife?"

John snorted. "If we'd actually _told_ the vicar you were marrying an alien, I doubt there would have been a wedding at all. He'd think we were crazy!"

"Quite a lot of people think you're crazy anyway," Rose reminded him.

"But not you?"

He suddenly looked so worried that Rose bent to kiss him without thinking. "Of course not," she reassured him, after the kiss.

* * *

That night, as they lay in bed together, John looked over at his wife and smiled.

"You know," he whispered, "you don't look any different to the day we first met."

He expected her to thank him with kisses, or to start reminiscing about that first time, or maybe to make a cheeky comment about how she couldn't say the same for him because he'd regenerated since then. But Rose said nothing, and John realised that she was actually giving this matter serious thought.

"I know," she said finally. "The woman in the corner shop asked me for proof of age the other day. She wouldn't believe I was over 21, isn't that weird!"

John frowned. "I didn't mean it literally," he said. He hadn't thought that through before he said it, and hoped Rose wouldn't take it as an insult, but she seemed too busy thinking about the problem of her age.

Which, now he thought about it, was strange. _Very_ strange.

Rose nodded to herself. "This world's been running ahead of… of the one you were in. The one the alien Doctor's in now. I was gone for two years for you, but it was three for me. And you lose track of time inside the TARDIS, but I bet we spent at least a year travelling together. Maybe more. That makes me officially twenty-three or so, and yet I still look like a nineteen-year-old. Exactly the same as when we first met."

"Not when we first met…" murmured John, reaching up to touch the scar at the base of her neck, acquired in 1336 Japan when a man held a knife to her throat. "Exactly the same as…" _No. Oh please no. Not this, not now!_

He closed his eyes, accessing a certain part of his mind. A Time Lord part. The part that warned him of things that shouldn't be there, things that were _wrong_. He'd shut it off after running from Captain Jack back in the year 200100, knowing that they'd cross paths again some day.

_The scar on Rose's neck happened just before we ended up on the GameStation. And I shut off that part of my mind while Bad Wolf was there, just after Jack woke up. So that means…_

_Please, in the name of Rassilon, let me be wrong!_

John activated that part of his mind again, just for a second, just to check whether he was right. And of course he was.

"Exactly the same as you were just after Bad Wolf left," he whispered finally. His voice was so soft Rose had to lean close to hear it. "You haven't changed at all since then. You haven't aged, you haven't been injured -"

"I have," Rose corrected him, also whispering. "Lots of times. Working for Torchwood."

"But it hasn't left any scars," John continued. "You've healed quickly, too. Survived things everyone thought would kill you."

Rose pulled away from him. "How do you know?" she breathed.

"I… you remind me of a friend of mine," he told her evasively. _Please,_ he willed her silently, _don't work it out. Let me have this time with you._

But she did work it out, of course. Rose was brilliant; he'd always said that.

"You mean Jack," she murmured. "You're saying Bad Wolf made me like Jack."

Then it started to sink in. "I'm a fixed point in space and time!" she choked. "Oh god, you must hate me! I'm _wrong_, like you said Jack was!"

John took her in his arms and let her cry on his shoulder. "No, no," he reassured her. "I've shut that part of my mind off now. You're just another human to me… well, no you're not, you're my wife!"

_Please, don't realise it. Please…_

Rose gave a shaky laugh. Then she froze, horrified.

"_Just another human…_oh god! You're human now! You're human - and I'm not!"

Another time, John decided, he'd have appreciated that irony. Their positions were reversed. But he knew what Rose would do now, because it was the same thing he'd done, when he was the Doctor. She would distance herself from him, because she couldn't bear to watch him fade and die.

"_You can spend the rest of your life with me,_" murmured Rose, remembering what John as the Doctor had told her in that school. "_But I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on._"

John sighed. "So you understand," he said dully, and got out of the bed, reaching for his dressing-gown. _This has to be done._

Rose stared after him in bewilderment. "But… where are you going?"

"I don't know," said John bitterly. "Anywhere. Everywhere. You won't want to watch me grow old. It's better for you if I distance myself while I can."

"No!" snapped Rose. "I'll tell you where you're going: _nowhere_. You're staying right here, with me."

John stared. "But -"

"I just told you, John. You can spend the rest of your life with me. We've both waited too long for this, far too long. And you're _not_ running away again!"

John smiled down at her, slipping back under the covers. "I'm not going to run away, Rose," he whispered. "Not from you, not any more."

And he leant in and kissed her, and didn't care about the consequences, and nor did she.


	2. The Smith Children

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**2: The Smith Children**

"_Well, I was thinking, if she's a girl, maybe we could call her after one of your other companions?"_

_John looked hard at his wife, remembering how jealous she'd been of Martha and Sarah Jane at first. "You're sure?" he asked her._

"_Absolutely certain!" grinned Rose. "Martha, or Donna, or Sarah Jane, or even someone I've never met, if you like."_

"_Donna," said John firmly. Rose smiled._

"_I thought so," she admitted. "I mean, she sort of created you."_

"_Well, yeah, that too," agreed John, "but that wasn't why I said it." He took a deep breath. "There has never been a human-Time Lord metacrisis, Rose. There can't be. I - the Doctor - would have had to wipe her memories. Otherwise… she would have died. I'm sorry."_

"_So she won't remember," murmured Rose. "She'll never remember. And she did so much…"_

And so, when their first child was born, and she was a daughter, they named her Donna.

* * *

"_What about if he's a boy?"_

_Rose shrugged. "Is there anyone you'd like to name him after? One of the Time Lords?"_

_John sighed. "Time Lords don't tell _anyone_ their true names. And most of their nicknames would attract too much attention for a human child." He trailed off in thought._

"_I suppose we could call him Mickey," mused Rose._

"_Or Ricky."_

"_Well, you'd better make your mind up," Rose said crossly, "because you're _not_ getting our son's name wrong!"_

"_Fine, Mickey then. Mickey Smith II… no, I don't want him to feel second-best. Oh, I don't know!"_

_There was silence for a moment, as both parents considered and rejected boy's names._

"_Harold," said John finally. "Harry."_

_Rose raised her eyebrows. "Where did that come from?"_

"_Harold Saxon," admitted John. "The Master." He sighed. "He was a good friend once…"_

And so, when their second child was born, the year after the first, and he was a son, they named him Harold.

* * *

Both Rose and John had agreed that two children was a good number, and it was nice to have a boy and a girl, and although they wouldn't mind another child things were good as they were.

And so the third child, four years after the other two, was a complete accident.

They talked vaguely about Michael or Peter for a boy, and Susan or Sarah for a girl, but they never found a name they both were sure on.

* * *

Rose sobbed into her pillow.

It had seemed such a good idea at first. She had to stay with John, because she knew first hand how he'd feel if she didn't. She wanted him to enjoy his life as a human.

And even though she had to live on, she didn't see why she couldn't have one lifetime's happiness with John.

But now she had two children (Donna was five and Harold four) and a third due in a week's time. And she would have to watch them grow up too, watch them age and wither and die.

The night before she'd had a dream that the third child was a daughter who looked exactly like her, and she'd had to watch her own face grow and age, turn into an old woman and finally die. She didn't think she could bear it if that happened.

"I hate you, Bad Wolf!" screamed Rose through her tears.

And her laptop lit up, two words filling the screen.

BAD WOLF.

The scrap of paper she'd scribbled down a possible name on now bore two words.

BAD WOLF.

The pattern on the duvet seemed, when she looked closer, to be made up of tiny words.

BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF…

"Bad Wolf!" choked Rose.

And her waters broke.

* * *

"So… Susan?" suggested Rose, looking down at her newborn daughter. John frowned.

"It doesn't really suit her, does it?" he mused. "Nor does Sarah. Or Martha, for that matter."

Rose stared down at her daughter. There was something about her that she couldn't quite put her finger on… She was _special _somehow, but Rose didn't know how. And the words "Bad Wolf" must have appeared _then_ for a reason; she and John had talked a lot about Bad Wolf and never seen the words.

The name came to her as she thought. "Freya."

"Freya?" asked John. "Where did you get _that_ from?"

"Dunno, I just think it suits her," Rose shrugged.

John looked at his daughter more closely. "It _does_!" he realised.

"Freya Smith," Rose breathed. "She's going to be special, some day."

Later, when it was just her and Freya, Rose found John's stethoscope and checked Freya's heartbeat.

She was bitterly disappointed to hear only one heart.


	3. Mummy's Crying

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**3: "Mummy's Crying"**

Donna had always been unusually quiet as a baby. As soon as she could talk, however, she asked question after question, until it was difficult to keep her quiet at all.

But whenever she met anyone new, she would stand still for a minute, just _looking_ at this stranger. Once, when Rose had invited several of her non-Torchwood friends in for coffee, they had met Donna in the hallway. Faced with an angelic blonde four-year-old blocking their way and staring solemnly at them, they had been understandably surprised. In fact, they had suddenly found better things to do with their time and left the house in a hurry.

"Why were they scared, mummy?" Donna asked Rose afterwards.

"Because they don't understand," Rose told her. It was a useful answer to lots of Donna's questions, which tended to involve people's reactions to her, her brother or her parents.

Donna's habit of _looking_ at strangers made it difficult to take her out into London at first. Shortly after the business with Rose's friends, however, Donna seemed to decide to herself that she didn't need to _look_ at everyone, just the strangers who spoke to her.

However, she never really gave up asking difficult questions, mostly about people's opinions.

"Mummy, why's that man looking at us like he doesn't like you?" she asked, one day out in London when she was five.

The man in question was in his fifties, wearing a business suit, and Rose had dealt with his sort before. He thought she was nineteen, which she looked, rather than twenty-eight, which she was. He therefore assumed she'd got pregnant at fourteen, and disapproved.

Now, how to explain all that to a five-year-old?

"He thinks I'm too young to be looking after you," she said finally. After all, that was the truth. A very basic, watered-down version of the truth, but still…

"But you're not, are you, Mummy?" Donna persisted.

"No, of course not, silly!" said Rose, wondering what to say next. "I just… look younger than I am. See?"

Donna looked at her for a moment, then nodded, and they moved on.

But Rose remembered both incidents: that one, and the one with her non-Torchwood friends. She added new observations as they came, wondering all the time how Donna knew so much about people.

* * *

But it wasn't until some months after that, when Rose was pregnant with her third child, that she began to suspect the truth.

It had started with another of Donna's innocent, but awkward, questions. This particular one had been brought on by a visit to her grandparents, Jackie and Pete Tyler.

"Where are Daddy's mummy and daddy?"

Of course, Donna couldn't have known. It was a logical question to her, since she'd known "Mummy's mummy and daddy" all her life, but never met her father's parents. When she'd asked, she couldn't have known how it would make John feel.

But as John tried to hide his grief, and Rose tried to work out what to tell Donna, she looked up at the two of them. And then she _looked _at them, a slightly different, more intense kind of look.

And then Donna looked away. "Sorry," she said softly. "It don't matter. Don't say."

And then Rose thought she knew what Donna was, what skills she had.

* * *

She tried to find ways to tell John, but it was too hard to find the words. Too hard to find an opening, so that she didn't just blurt it out in the middle of some other innocent conversation.

She chose to procrastinate, to keep putting it off until some other time. The next time they went out in the evening… when they discovered something similar at work… when they'd finished sorting out Harold's room… when her third child was born…

Rose didn't want to tell John, because that would mean admitting she was right. And admitting she was right would mean having to tell Donna, and telling Donna would mean she'd never have a normal life.

That was all Rose wanted. Just for this lifetime, a normal life.

But in the end, John found out by himself.

* * *

John came into the living room one day to find Donna and Harold playing some game they'd made up, where Donna built a tower while Harold took away the bricks in it. Both children were perfectly happy, so he sat down and enjoyed watching them.

Rose walked past, heading towards the stairs, not looking especially happy, but definitely alright.

As she left the room, Donna started to cry.

John rushed to her side, but could see no reason for her tears. She wasn't hurt; Harold hadn't completely pulled the tower down…

"What's the matter, sweetheart?" he asked her gently.

"Mummy's crying," Donna sobbed.

John stiffened. He'd seen this kind of thing before, back on Gallifrey. "What do you mean, Donna?" he asked carefully. "She's not crying. We just saw her, remember?"

"Yes, but…" Donna struggled to put her feelings into words. "I just looked at her, and I saw her crying. She isn't, but she _is_. She's crying and she isn't and I don't like it!" She started to cry again.

"Donna," said John slowly. "Donna, look at me."

She rubbed her eyes and did so. John marvelled at his daughter's composure. Donna still talked like a very young child, but sometimes she acted so mature…

And then Donna _looked_ at him, and he _looked_ at her.

Even as a Time Lord, he'd never been great at telepathy. He'd always needed skin contact, most of the time to the temples. But now he made contact so easily, because it was Donna contacting _him_, not him reaching out to Donna. For a moment, John dreamed of what it would be like if he could do this all the time, the power it would give him…

And then he found Donna's emotions, a swirl of fear and confusion and Rose's sadness and her own sadness, and remembered that sometimes telepathy was a curse rather than a gift.

Because that was the truth. Donna was a telepath.


	4. Donna and Harold: Truth Tellers

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter. I don't own Donna's skills either; they were my sister's idea, inspired by someone's Harry Potter fanfiction.

**4: Donna and Harold: Truth Tellers**

Over the next few months, they tested Donna, working out the limits of her skill. It proved that whenever Donna looked at someone's face, she saw their surface thoughts (whatever they were thinking at the moment). By _looking_ at them in a different way (as she put it), she could look deeper, and search their memories and other thoughts for specific ideas or intentions.

The next order of business was to teach Donna not to _look_ at people. Earlier, she had evidently decided that any stranger was a potential threat, and so had _looked_ deeply to see if it was true.

Unfortunately, Donna couldn't control that first look. She read surface thoughts all the time; the only way for her to stop was to look away. This could be very unpleasant for her, if she met someone who was sad, or who hated her, but she learned to live with it and ignore people's thoughts if necessary.

John also began trying to teach her to "shoot" thoughts into someone else's mind, so that they could have a mental conversation.

Under the rules of Torchwood, anyone with "alien skills" had to be reported. The report had to be signed by two Torchwood members and filed in the archives. Of course, that wasn't a problem. Rose wrote the report, she and John signed it, and John filed it very carefully in a little-used part of the computer network, burying it in cyberspace alongside the reports of his heritage and Rose's immortality, and then they both forgot about it.

* * *

Donna, Harold and Freya grew up hearing impossible stories. Stories of time travel, which wasn't possible. Stories of a world where there were aeroplanes and a Queen and Prime Minister, instead of zeppelins and a President. Stories of Time Lords, which were a mythical race an alien had once told Torchwood Alpha about, and Daleks, which were aliens Rose and John had completely made up. Stories of Rose herself, and Uncle Mickey who had disappeared before Donna was born, and Martha Milligan from Torchwood Alpha, but never of John.

"Are you in the stories, Dad?" Donna asked him, and he said no, he wasn't. And that was the truth, but somehow there was more to it.

"Are they _true_?" was her next question.

"They're just what _might_ have happened in a world where there were Time Lords," Rose told her. "They're not true in _this_ world." And that was the truth as well, but Donna sensed a second meaning behind her words.

"And Time Lords aren't real?"

"No," said John firmly. He met Rose's eyes briefly, sending her a meaningful glance. "No Time Lords; no Daleks."

And that was the absolute truth.

* * *

"There's something they're not telling us," ten-year-old Donna stated. "I keep seeing it, when they tell those stories. But when they say they didn't happen, that's true. I see it."

"I've researched," nine-year-old Harold agreed. "I mean, at face value they're just stories, aren't they? Aliens _didn't_ blow up Downing Street or send hospitals to the moon. There _aren't _spaceships in the sky at Christmas. Vesuvius didn't erupt in Roman times… But I'll tell you something _weird_."

"What?" asked Freya eagerly. At five years old it was doubtful how much of the conversation she understood, but she was listening all the same. Freya was good at listening.

"You know that story with Queen Victoria and the werewolf?" Harold began. "1897, they said. Queen Victoria's travelling to Balmoral Castle by carriage, because a tree fell on the train line to Aberdeen. She stays the night at the Torchwood estate and gets attacked by an alien werewolf. The Doctor and Rose save her and she sets up Torchwood to guard against other alien threats."

"We know the story," said Donna impatiently; Harold was sitting side-on, so that she couldn't see his face - or his thoughts - properly; they were hidden by his ginger hair.

"But do you know the _facts_?" asked Harold. "They're all there if you know where to look. When the Queen went up to Balmoral in 1879, she _did_ travel by carriage. The journey _did_ coincide with the full moon. She _did_ stay the night at Torchwood. Then for some reason she cut her journey short and returned to London. Several courtiers mysteriously _disappeared_ over the course of a week. Then there was a coup, the Queen was overthrown and a President installed… And the Torchwood Institute was set up - _to guard against alien threats_."

"You mean dere really was a werewolf?" gasped Freya.

Harold shrugged. "The story fits," he said. "Except there was no Doctor or Rose to save the day. _That_ part's still just a story."

"I'll tell you something else that's weird," said Donna suddenly. "I only just remembered it, but… When Mum and Dad are telling the stories, I like to look at their faces, to see how they picture these aliens. And they both picture them _exactly the same_. Even right down to how the werewolf stood, or how the Slitheen cut through a door - right down to the arrangement of the furniture in a room, or where a certain outfit was in the TARDIS wardrobe. It's like they both remember those things."

"But Dad isn't even _in_ the stories," Harold objected. "And you say Mum's telling the truth when she said they didn't happen."

_They're not true in __this__ world._

Freya, always a good listener, had remembered what Rose had said word for word, right down to her tone and emphasis. She hadn't fully understood, of course, but she remembered. And now Donna happened to look her in the eye as Freya remembered, and Donna saw that memory. And she put two and two together.

"Not true in _this _world… what about in another? What about parallel universes?"

"Parallel universes?" asked Harold in disbelief. "_Parallel universes_?" Then he paused, realising.

"Parallel universes!" he shouted, and raced into John's study, sitting down at the computer. His sisters followed him, looking utterly mystified.

Within minutes Harold was searching through the Torchwood Archives. "I thought I saw something about it before," he explained as he searched, pulling up a page showing various abandoned developmental projects. "There, see? The Dimension Cannon. Torchwood Beta - the primary research team - spent three years working on it, helped by Rose Tyler. Then all of a sudden, just when Dad appeared and Uncle Mickey disappeared, they abandoned the project and decided it'd never work."

"So you fink Dad's from anuvver world?" asked Freya.

"Mum, too," Donna suggested. "She appeared too, three years before Dad did. I read it from someone reading a gossip magazine."

"_Really_?" asked Harold, sounding intensely interested. He began to type furiously. Strings of coded letters and numbers filled the screen, and then something else took over: another code or language that Donna had never seen before, hexagonal-based and profoundly alien.

"Ha!" shouted Harold, as two Torchwood reports appeared on the screen, labelled _Rose Smith (nee Tyler)_ and _John Smith_.

* * *

"Why didn't you _tell_ us?" asked Donna, who the children had chosen as spokesperson.

"If I'd told you I was a half-alien from a parallel universe, would you have believed me?" asked John in return.

"Yes," said Donna firmly. Rose held up a hand-mirror so that Donna could see her own face, and therefore her thoughts.

"Well, maybe not," Donna amended, "but you should have _said_."

"We were going to tell you when the time was right!" protested Rose.

"And in the meantime," John put in, "you weren't supposed to find those files. How did you do it anyway?"

"Harold did it," Donna shrugged.

"It was fairly easy," Harold agreed.

"Fairly easy?" asked John in disbelief. "I filed those reports in the _impregnable_ Torchwood Archives, buried them under the entire protocol history, wrote filters that prevented them from being displayed on _any_ computer, sealed them with Gallifreyan passwords, and tossed them through a black hole in cyberspace, and it was _fairly easy_ to find?"

"Are you sure it went _frew _the black hole?" asked Freya innocently. "What if it got stuck in gee-oh-stay-shun-ry orbit?"

And so the truth came out. There were no more secrets in the family…

Except that _all_ of them tended to fall silent suddenly when the subject of Freya came up.


	5. They Work for Torchwood

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter. Oh, and the Anax were my brother's idea originally.

**5: "They Work for Torchwood"**

"Have a good first day!"

"Thanks, mum."

"And no _looking_!" Rose continued.

Donna rolled her eyes; she knew that would come into it somewhere. "How old do you think I am?" she demanded.

"Thirty?" offered John. Donna sighed, reading from his face that that would be her equivalent age as a Time Lord.

"Not funny, Dad," she groaned. She climbed out of the car and set off, following the tide of other children heading to the entrances.

"First day at secondary school," sighed Rose.

"They grow up so fast," agreed John.

"Can we get sentimental _after_ me and Freya are at school?" demanded Harold.

"Yeah," agreed Freya. "I think we're going to be late. It's half past eight."

John gave Freya a piercing look. "How can you tell?" he asked her. Freya showed him her watch, which did indeed say 8:30. "I didn't see you look at it," he said lamely.

"You didn't look," Freya shrugged. "But we really are going to be late."

John looked at the time again, swore in some alien language, put the car into gear and drove off very fast.

* * *

Donna spent the first minute people-watching, sorting out who was who and what they were like. Then she singled out one girl, who was moving through various groups of people introducing herself to them. She was getting to know people, making friends, but Donna could see the thoughts behind her smile, and knew that she was making friends because they were useful, not because they were nice people.

Well, two could play at that game. Donna steeled herself, put on her best charming smile and moved off.

She introduced herself to a couple of other people first, the ones the other girl hadn't got to yet. Then she made sure they met, seemingly by chance.

It was always disconcerting, seeing other people's first impressions of her. This girl, whose name was apparently Melissa, thought she was a just pretty face, not particularly intelligent or important. Donna thought Melissa was an arrogant snob.

She smiled sweetly and waited for Melissa to introduce herself, which she did.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Melissa Cole. That's Cole as in Lord Cole of Tarminster. He's my grandfather."

_Not exactly subtle,_ Donna noted.

"I'm Donna," she said in return. "Donna Smith."

"Smith?" That didn't change Melissa's opinion of her at all. _Such a _common_ surname,_ she was thinking. _No one special, then. A waste of my time._

Outwardly she maintained the smile, though it was slightly less enthusiastic now. "And… what do _your_ parents do, then?" _That's an opportunity to humiliate her. They can't be rich or famous, or I'd have heard of her._

Donna's smile broadened. "They work for Torchwood."

Melissa's jaw dropped. "Torchwood?" she gasped.

"Yes, Torchwood." Donna smiled condescendingly, because she _knew_ Melissa would hate that. "Haven't you heard of it? It's a government organisation; it deals with aliens -"

"I know what it is!" Melissa snapped. Donna raised her eyebrows at that outburst, idly wishing she had mastered the art of raising only one, the way her father had.

After a while, Melissa realised that snapping at Donna would not gain her the new ally she wanted, and relented.

"Sorry," she said, though you didn't have to be a telepath to see that she didn't mean a word of it. "I just…"

"I understand," said Donna, just as insincerely.

_First ally!_ she thought to herself with satisfaction.

_A contact in Torchwood!_ thought Melissa.

* * *

Melissa would have been even more impressed if she had known Donna's parents' full job description. Rose was in fact the head of Torchwood Alpha, which handled negotiation between humans and other alien species, and John was her deputy. Other team members included Dr Martha Milligan, Ianto Jones, Lisa Hallett and Yvonne Hartman, although John in particular disapproved of Yvonne's methods.

Right now, Torchwood Alpha was seated round a table with the ambassadors from a race of tall, stringy bipedal orange aliens who had so far refused to identify themselves.

"Right then," said Rose, switching on the translation circuit John had made out of a TARDIS key and several varied bits of alien technology. "My name is Rose Smith, head of Torchwood Alpha, species human, planet Earth, time-frame 21st century. Please state your names, status, species, planet and time-frame."

Yvonne tapped out a quick instant message and sent it to Rose: _I don't know _why_ you insist on including _time-frame_. We tracked their ship all the way from past Jupiter._

Rose sighed inwardly - this old argument again! - and wrote back: _As I _keep _telling you, there's no harm in checking._

"_We are the Anax._"

It was impossible to tell which had spoken; it might have been any one of them, or all of them, or even someone else through an intercom.

Mindful of his mistake with the Slitheen Raxacoricofallapatorians, John was sure to ask, "And is Anax the name of your species, or of some other grouping?"

"_We are the Anax. Species Anax, planet Anaq, time-frame current. We have no names or status._"

Rose understood now: these were a telepathic race, each one connected mentally to all the others of its kind. Names were irrelevant. She turned off the translation circuit, which wasn't necessary when dealing with telepaths.

A note from John appeared on the screen of her laptop: _Great. More telepaths._

_We do seem to meet rather a lot, don't we. _she sent back.


	6. Snob, Geek, Cutie, Telepath?

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**6: Snob, Geek, Cutie, Telepath?**

"Oh, and I _must_ introduce you to one of my other friends," Melissa prattled, as Donna smiled and said what she wanted to hear and read her mind (mostly full of gossip and money). "She's _amazing_, a complete _genius_. I met her at the induction evening; she was reading this biology book, _seriously_ advanced stuff. _And_ she's really friendly, too."

_I could convince her to do all my homework, no problem, _Melissa was thinking. Just then Donna got a glimpse of Melissa's memory of this "genius" and almost laughed out loud: this was just _perfect_!

She slipped away from Melissa as if she'd just seen someone she'd rather talk to, which she had, really. This someone was a tall black girl sitting in a corner reading GCSE physics.

"Yasmin!" she called as she neared the corner, just loud enough that Melissa would hear her too. "I haven't seen you for _months_!"

Yasmin Milligan looked up from her book and grinned back at Donna. "Months?" she asked cheerfully. "It hasn't been _that_ long, surely? I was round your house a couple of weeks ago, wasn't I?"

"You spent the _whole_ time on Harry's computer!" retorted Donna. "I barely even _saw _you."

She turned round to see Melissa approaching and trying to conceal her irritation. Donna met her with a cheerful smile. "Hi Melissa, have you two met? Yasmin, this is Melissa Cole, as in _Lord_ Cole of Tarminster." She winked at Yasmin, who suppressed a grin at the emphasis Donna put on _Lord_. "And Melissa, this is Yasmin Milligan; her mother's in my mum's team. So, who were you going to introduce me to?"

"Actually, it was Yasmin," Melissa admitted.

"Oh, well, sorry. That was a bit of a pointless introduction then, wasn't it? Seeing as you two already know each other, I mean." She pretended not to see the temper tantrum brewing. Melissa was too used to being in the spotlight. She saw Donna as stealing her glory.

"Still," Yasmin smiled, "that means we're all friends!"

"Yeah," said Melissa, glowering at Donna behind Yasmin's back. "All friends."

* * *

That day, just before Physics started, Tony Tyler showed up to check up on Donna, despite her insistences that she didn't need to be checked up on. He just walked into the classroom and right up to Donna and said casually, "Hey, Donna. How're you doing?"

A sudden silence fell over the room, because Tony was in year 10 and on the football team, and here he was talking casually with a year 7 "firstie". Donna ignored it, shrugged and said, "Yeah, alright. You?"

"Not bad." Unsurprisingly, he was checking up on her at the request of his parents. More surprisingly, though, it was Pete Tyler as well as Jackie who had asked him to do so. As director of Torchwood, Donna decided, he was probably worried about her abilities… but as her grandfather, it was nice to know he had been worried about her too.

And then Tony had left, and the chatter all around returned. And one voice, close to Donna's ear, said, "Is he your _boyfriend_?"

Donna mentally rolled her eyes (if such a thing was possible): why did girls' thoughts always come back to _boyfriends_? The speaker was a tall, blonde girl who judging by her thoughts was called Lizzie.

"No, he is not my boyfriend!" She couldn't be bothered to keep the irritation out of her voice. "That's just… _wrong_! I mean, he's my uncle!"

"Uncle?" That was two voices, Lizzie and Melissa.

"Tony Tyler's your _uncle_?" gasped Lizzie. She got herself under control and smiled. "Hi, I'm Lizzie. Elizabeth Bennett. Do you think I could get to know your uncle?" _I mean, he is so _hot_!_ Donna winced at Lizzie's mental images: she _really_ didn't need to know what Lizzie imagined her uncle to look like without a shirt.

"Elizabeth Bennett?" Yasmin suppressed a giggle.

"Something wrong with that?" asked Lizzie.

"No, no, just… ever read _Pride and Prejudice_?"

"So you're related to the Tylers?" Melissa returned to the previous topic, leaving Yasmin and Lizzie to look oddly at each other.

"Peter Tyler's my grandfather," Donna said, as if it was no big deal. _There you go, Melissa. My grandfather's probably just as rich as yours, but I didn't shout it out to the world. Learn some tact, why don't you?_

She glanced over at Lizzie. _I'm friends with Tony Tyler's niece! _she was thinking. _Maybe I can get a date with him out of this!_

At least Donna _knew_ two of her friends were only friends with her because of her family. And at least she had Yasmin.

And speaking of family, she was sure she'd heard of Melissa's surname before, in her father's thoughts. She'd have to tell him about Melissa.

"Alright then, class, settle down!" called their Physics teacher. "My name's Miss Noble; I hope you'll all enjoy my classes."

She was middle-aged, ginger-haired and her name was apparently Diana. Diana Noble…

She'd have to tell her father about her, too.


	7. A Possible Future

**Disclaimer:** see previous chapter.

**7: A Possible Future**

"So then, Anax," began Rose. "Do you have a reason for coming here?"

It was always better to phrase questions like that; she'd learned that the hard way. Lisa had once asked the representatives of the Xynoi race why they'd come to Earth. They'd spent several hours debating their answer.

"_We are making a catalogue,_" the Anax replied. "_A great catalogue of all the races in this sector of the Spiral. You say you are called Humans. Is that correct?_"

"Yes, that's correct." Rose smiled. "This catalogue is a great project."

"Too great," said John suspiciously. "This project would take _years_. Lifetimes. You must have a very good reason to do it…"

"_We seek allies from among the races._"

"Allies?" prompted Ianto.

"_The war is coming soon. We must have allies._"

"Nononono_no_!" snapped John. "Earth isn't fighting. You shouldn't be fighting either, if it comes to that."

"_You have no way to stop us fighting,_" continued the emotionless telepathic voice - or voices. "_But we do not ask Earth to fight. We need telepathic warriors. Humans are not telepathic. We see that now._"

For a moment, Rose thought of Donna's powers, then of the powers Harold and Freya might develop in the future… But they weren't human powers. She looked at the Anax the same way she used to look at Donna to tell her half-truths as if they were the full truth.

"No," she agreed. "Humans aren't telepathic."

* * *

After the Anax had left, John followed Rose into her office, shut the door and sank down in one of the chairs. For a while, silence ensued.

"We could have gone with them," he said finally. "Back to their planet. Sorted out that war. Negotiated."

Rose raised her eyebrows. "You could have suggested it earlier," she pointed out, but she knew why he hadn't. The Doctor dealt with alien affairs on their own turf. John Smith knew that he wasn't the Doctor.

John was staring off into the middle distance. "If I'd had the TARDIS…" he mused.

Rose sighed dreamily, imagining a future like that. The two of them, together, with the TARDIS… "You'd need your sonic screwdriver," she said distantly. "And psychic paper. Dimensionally transcendental pockets'd come in handy too, what with the amount of stuff you accumulate."

"_And_ we'd need someone competent to lead Torchwood Alpha," John continued. "I'm not about to leave it in Yvonne Hartman's hands."

"You're not about to leave it at all," Rose said gloomily. "No Time Lords in this universe, remember? No TARDISes, either."

John sighed. "We can dream, though."

* * *

Rose and John spent that afternoon in Rose's office, trying to write up a report on the Anax's visit in the morning for the Torchwood archives. _Trying being the operative word,_ Rose reflected. She herself kept going off on tangents, wondering who the Anax would be fighting, and why, and what she and John could have done to stop it if they'd had a TARDIS to escape in as a backup plan. Beside her, John was doodling designs for sonic screwdrivers on her notelets.

"I know what we'll do," said Rose suddenly. "I'll wait three thousand years, join the Time Agency, come back to now with a Vortex Manipulator, pick you up and we'll go travelling through time and space."

"Who'd look after the children?" John objected. "Who'd run Torchwood Alpha?"

"I would," grinned Rose. "I'd be taking the linear route. The slow path."

"You'd be crossing your own timeline," John pointed out.

Rose considered that. "We should be safe as long as I don't see myself or do anything stupid… and as long as you don't tell me anything when you get back."

They were making these plans half in fun, but Rose looked incredibly serious. John realised just how much she was willing to give away: if these plans actually did happen, she'd have to wait three thousand years for her chance to travel with him. And if he came back, he'd never be able to tell her anything, and she'd see him come back happier and have to wait millennia to experience those joys for herself. And if he didn't come back, she'd always know, when she came back in time for him, that on one of these trips he'd die.

But he put such morbid thoughts out of his head. It wasn't like this would ever really happen.

"I really could do with some equipment, though," he added. "Sonic screwdriver, psychic paper… pockets."

"If Jack had psychic paper, I ought to be able to get hold of some," Rose reasoned. "It's probably standard issue for Time Agents. Sonic screwdriver… I'd have to bring you the parts you needed so you could make it yourself. As to bigger-on-the-inside pockets… Doesn't that suit have them? It _was_ the Doctor's once, after all."

John sighed. "Well, yeah, it _ought_ to have them. I thought it did. But I wasn't exactly bothered about checking; didn't have anything to put in them anyway. And then by the time I realised I'd picked the only suit in the wardrobe with ordinary pockets, it was a bit late to worry about changing!"

Rose snorted. "Imagine asking Davros if you could go and get changed!"

They both chuckled a bit over that image, before turning serious again.

"But yeah," Rose frowned. "It is a bit… _odd_. I mean, the Doctor used to wear those blue suits, too - not that he ever really liked them. Why would he have a suit with ordinary pockets?"

"Hang on a minute…" said John slowly. "I - the Doctor - had two blue suits and two pinstriped ones, with proper Time Lord pockets. Then - I see it now! It was after I'd rebuilt the TARDIS, I noticed something had gone wrong with this suit's pockets, but I had more important things on my mind then."

"Like the Titanic crashing through the wall."

"Yeah," he admitted. "Like that. But…" He trailed off, lost in thought, and began talking more to himself than to her. "I told Jack to hide it," he mused. "I never said anything about _where_. Jack was a conman; he knows all about hiding things. The best place to hide something is where you expect it to be… Oh yes!"

"What?" demanded Rose.

"I gave it to Jack to hide," John explained. "I didn't trust myself with it. I told him that, and he must have figured that I'd never look in a pocket that wasn't - apparently - big enough. So…" He put his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and moved it around. Suddenly there was a loud ripping sound and his whole arm disappeared into the pocket.

"Oh, Jack's clever! An ordinary pocket with a dimensionally transcendental secret compartment! He took the established technology and used it for his own purpose!"

"So what's in there?" breathed Rose.

John reached back into the pocket and withdrew…

"The Master's laser screwdriver," he explained. "_Very_ dangerous. I still don't trust myself with it; you keep it."

Rose took the device cautiously. It was longer and heavier than the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, with three amber lights on the end instead of one blue one. "What should I do with it?" she asked.

"For now, nothing. But it's made from similar technology to my old sonic. If we can take it apart -"

"We might be able to build a sonic screwdriver out of it!" Rose laughed delightedly and kissed John.

_And some day, when that's done,_ she decided, _maybe my future self will show up and take John travelling._


	8. An Aunt called Lucy

**Disclaimer:** see previous chapter.

**8: An Aunt called Lucy**

When Donna got home that afternoon, she announced to the whole family that her Physics teacher was called Diana Noble.

"You mean _Donna_ Noble," Harold corrected her.

"No," said Freya, as if it were obvious, "she said _Diana_."

"She _was_ Donna Noble," Donna reported. "The Donna Noble from this world. But her name's Diana, not Donna."

"And she's a Physics teacher?" asked Rose in disbelief.

John grinned. "Somewhere in her family history _something_ must have changed to make her parents prefer Diana to Donna. And it's nice to see her - or a version of her - using a bit more of her potential."

"I bet she couldn't have done what Donna Noble did, though," Rose sighed.

"Martha Milligan couldn't have done what Martha Jones did, before we recruited her for Torchwood," John countered.

Martha Jones, Donna remembered, had walked the earth for a year. Somehow the name Cole had been connected to that, although she didn't know much about that year. But that reminded Donna of her second question.

"And I've made a friend called Melissa Cole," she added. "But the thing is, I seem to remember that surname from your thoughts, Dad."

"Cole…" he mused. "Cole… Has she got an aunt called Lucy?"

Donna managed to glean from his thoughts that the Lucy Cole from his world had married an alien. Then a door slammed shut on that train of thought. To learn more, she'd have to _look_ deeper, which she wasn't allowed to do.

Donna shrugged. "Dunno," she said casually. "I'll ask her. Tomorrow."

* * *

"I told my dad about you," Donna told Melissa the next day before lessons started.

"He's heard about my family, right?" _Of course he has. He must have done. After all, my grandfather _is _Lord Cole of Tarminster._

"Yeah," agreed Donna casually. "He wanted to know if you had an aunt called Lucy."

_Mad Aunt Lucy?_ Melissa thought. _What does he want to know about _her_ for? She's nothing special. Just a stupid _artist_ who doesn't care about money._

Aloud she said, "Yes, I've got an Aunt Lucy. Actually, she lives with my family."

"Really?" asked Donna, filing away that information for later. _Doesn't care about money?_ she reflected._ Not necessarily a bad thing._

"Yes, really." Melissa frowned. "How does your dad know her, anyway?" _Why does he care about some artist? And how come he didn't ask about the rest of my family?_

Donna shrugged. "How should I know? Did you expect him to tell me all of Torchwood's secrets?"

Then she smiled and watched Melissa squirm, because Donna knew she _had_ expected it. That was the only reason she (Melissa) had made friends with her.

* * *

"So this world's got another Lucy Saxon," sighed John, the next evening when the children were asleep. Donna had reported back to them at the end of that day regarding Melissa's Aunt Lucy.

"Lucy _Cole_," Rose reminded him. "And she's not a threat. No Time Lords in this universe."

"No Time Lords; no Daleks," John murmured. It had become something of a mantra for the two of them. "But there are other telepathic races in the universe. We met one of them just yesterday. And Lucy Saxon - Cole - was weak-minded. Easy to control."

Rose sighed. "Could you relax, just for once in your life?" she asked. "Not everyone's out to get you, you know."

* * *

That afternoon, when Melissa got home, she couldn't concentrate on anything, not even the latest mobile phone that her father had given her the day before. Her mind kept wandering back to her Aunt Lucy. How did Torchwood Alpha know about her? Why _her_ in particular, as opposed to her father, Melissa's grandfather? After all, there was nothing special about Lucy Cole…

Melissa got up abruptly, putting the mobile aside, and changed into her best red dress. In between other commitments, Aunt Lucy was painting her portrait. Perhaps while she was sitting for it, she could ask her about Torchwood Alpha.

Lucy had the whole ground floor of the east wing of their mansion for herself. She would have been happier in an ordinary flat, according to her mother's stories, but Melissa's father had refused to let his sister live like "a poverty-stricken artist". So she had a set of rooms which she had furnished like the flat she had intended to buy, and almost never ventured into the rest of the house.

Melissa picked her way cautiously through the shabby rooms: almost every surface had artists' equipment on it, including the floor, and was spotted with paint stains. She found Aunt Lucy in what was officially the dining room, hard at work at an easel. Melissa spotted a family group in the foreground before Lucy covered it up and got out the half-finished portrait of her niece. Melissa sat down on the gold-painted chair and folded her hands in her lap.

"I haven't seen you for weeks," Lucy commented as she worked.

"Sorry," said Melissa insincerely.

"No, you're not," Lucy corrected her, suddenly serious. "Melissa, your parents might encourage lying, but I'd like the truth, please."

Melissa rolled her eyes; a little white lie never did anyone any harm! But instead of arguing, she changed the subject. "I started secondary school," she said casually.

"Oh, really? Make any new friends?"

"Yes." Melissa decided now was as good a time as ever to question her aunt. "One of them's called Donna Smith; her parents work for Torchwood."

"Torchwood?" repeated Lucy. "That's the government institution, not the plant family _Burseraceae_, right?"

_Sometimes Aunt Lucy says the strangest things,_ Melissa noted. _I can't see why Torchwood's interested in her. _She's_ certainly not interested in them!_

She let the subject drop. After all, Lucy was a very common name, and Donna's father hadn't seemed to know for sure if this Lucy was part of Melissa's family.

* * *

When her niece had gone, Lucy Cole got her latest painting back out. She'd dreamed about it last night, and so now she was painting this scene. A private project.

The picture showed a family: mother, father and three children. The mother wore a grey suit and had dyed-blonde hair and brown eyes. She looked nineteen, although she had to be older. The father was in his forties, with brown eyes and messy brown hair, in a blue suit. The dream had told her their names: Rose and John.

The children were thirteen, twelve and eight respectively. The eldest was a girl, short and stocky, blonde and brown-eyed, wearing a red top and leggings. The only boy was tall and gangly, with a shock of ginger hair, in a shirt and jeans. The youngest girl had mousy hair, dull grey eyes and thick-framed glasses, was small and skinny, and was dressed in a drab-coloured T-shirt and black trousers.

Donna, Harold and Freya.

They were dangers, she knew that. Lucy's dreams had never been wrong yet. And now Melissa was friends with Donna…

But that meant Donna was eleven. In the picture - and the dream - she was thirteen.

Lucy would be safe for two more years.


	9. Visiting

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**9: Visiting**

Six weeks or so later, during the half-term holidays, Melissa invited Donna round to her family mansion for the day. The two of them spent most of this day exploring the rooms, with Melissa talking at length about anything expensive. Donna noticed that they never went into one wing, with Melissa explaining simply that it was "out of bounds". Donna knew from her thoughts that this was where her aunt Lucy lived, but decided not to press the subject.

During dinner in the evening (which Melissa's parents treated as a surprisingly formal affair) Melissa dropped several not-so-subtle hints about Donna's family. She claimed to be eager to meet Donna's parents _and_ grandparents. This meant that when Rose turned up to collect Donna, Melissa's father almost forced her into inviting Melissa over for a sleepover.

"They can spend the first day and the night at your house," Alexander Cole explained, "and then the second day at Donna's grandparents'. Don't you think that's a good idea?"

Rose agreed. Melissa's mother Elizabeth made small-talk with her for a while, while Alexander went to tell Melissa the good news. But when Elizabeth asked Rose an awkward question ("How do you manage to stay looking so _young_?") she decided it was time to leave.

"Remember I'm coming round next week!" Melissa shouted after them.

Donna and Rose looked at each other, and Donna rolled her eyes.

"As if I'm likely to forget," muttered Rose.

* * *

Melissa came round the next Saturday, and expressed great surprise at how "small" their house was. Donna showed her round and introduced her to her family. They chatted with Harold and Freya (although Freya didn't say much) about nothing in particular, and then Melissa managed to persuade Harold to "help her with her homework" (meaning "tell her the answers"). Donna and Freya exchanged glances at that.

"I bet he tells her the wrong answers deliberately," whispered Freya when they had left.

"_I _bet he starts waffling about quantum physics or something and she gives up and leaves," Donna whispered back.

A few minutes later, she wandered down to the living room and listened outside the door. Harold was indeed talking at ninety miles per hour (as Rose termed it), although the subject could have been anything from genetic manipulation to _The Merchant of Venice_ for all Donna understood it.

As she listened, he paused to ask, "So, any questions?"

"I don't understand," Melissa admitted.

"Really?" asked Harold. "It's quite simple, _I _thought. You see, the gravitational coefficient…" And he went off into another waffle.

Beside Donna, Freya had to stuff a fist into her mouth to stifle her laughter.

* * *

"Yvonne called," John reported, putting down the phone. "She said the Anax have come back. And they don't seem to remember coming here before."

Rose frowned. How could they forget, when they shared minds? One or two might, but not a whole species. Not to mention, Earth would be in their catalogue, even though it hadn't yielded them any allies.

"I'll go," she said.

"No, it's alright," John assured her. "I'll go. You stay home with the children."

"I'm in charge," Rose protested. "I ought to go."

"Yvonne's expecting _me_. She specifically called me, not you."

"Since when have I cared about what Yvonne thinks?"

"I didn't mean that!" protested John. "I meant that if you go, she'll start a huge argument with you and the Anax will be forgotten."

"Fair enough," Rose conceded.

"Besides," John added, "Jake wanted you on call. Epsilon are investigating that meteorite, remember?"

Jake Simmonds was the leader of Torchwood Epsilon, which dealt with "accidents", mostly covering up anything to do with potential alien invasions so the public didn't panic. Currently he and his team were checking out a meteorite which had fallen at around midday a few miles outside of London. Rose wondered if it was connected to the Anax's sudden memory loss.

"Alright, then," she nodded. "I'll stay. But if Jake calls, I'll be there."

Freya listened to this conversation from the other side of the door. It was closed, but she had good hearing. Then she went to find her siblings - and Melissa.

She found them in Harold's room. Melissa was trying to show them something on the computer, but it looked as though Donna and Harold already knew it.

"Dad's been called into work," she announced.

"Work? On a Saturday?" Melissa repeated in disbelief.

"Aliens don't only invade during office hours," Harold retorted.

"Invade?" Now Melissa sounded rather worried.

Donna leaned back in her chair and winked at the others. "Oh, it happens all the time," she lied. "Torchwood Alpha handle the aliens and Epsilon cover it up afterwards. Simple, unless of course they _can't_ handle them…"

"Mum told us a story once, about a bunch of aliens who nearly _did_ take over," Harold cut in. "The Slitheen family, they were called. From… I've forgotten the name of the planet."

"Raxacoricofallapatorius," Freya told the room at large.

"Rexi- _what_?" asked Melissa.

"Raxacoricofallapatorius," the siblings chorused.

Harold took up the narrative again. "You see, these Slitheen used to skin their victims. And they'd make the skin into a suit, and wear it as a disguise. Once it was on, you couldn't tell the difference between Slitheen and human. And they infiltrated the government; killed some of the ministers and took their places."

"And," Donna continued, "they were planning on nuking the whole planet. Setting off all the nuclear missiles in the world and blowing Earth to bits. Just pieces of molten slag."

"What use would that be?" demanded Melissa.

"Rocket fuel," Freya explained. "They were going to sell off the pieces."

Melissa looked from one earnest face to another. "You're making it up," she declared, but without conviction.

"No, we're not," Donna assured her.

Harold winked and made a thumbs-up sign, using the words that had made his grandfather's energy drink famous.

"You can trust me on this!"


	10. Dangers

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter. I don't own the Ode to Joy either.

**10: Dangers**

Over dinner, Melissa confronted Rose about the stories she'd heard from Donna and Harold.

"Donna was telling me a story about Slitheen," she began.

"Look, Donna, I've told you before," Rose sighed, and Melissa thought _Yes! She was lying! I knew it. _But Rose continued, "Don't call them Slitheen. If you ever meet Raxacoricofallapatorians of a different family, they'll take it as a deadly insult."

"So you _did_ meet them?" Melissa repeated, just to clarify the point.

"Twice," Rose agreed. "The first time involved Downing Street and nuclear missiles; the second was the Cardiff Rift and a nuclear power plant. _Very_ difficult to clean up, that second time. You'll still find conspiracy theories about earthquakes in Cardiff if you look hard enough."

That last bit, Donna knew, was misdirection. There _had _been earthquakes in Cardiff, caused by the Rift, but nothing to do with Slitheen. That bit had happened in the other universe.

Just then, Rose's mobile - which she kept on her at all times - rang. "Speak of the devil," she commented, stepping out of the room to answer it.

"Epsilon," Harold surmised. "After all, she was just talking about cleanup."

"She's been on standby for them all day," Donna agreed.

Sure enough, Rose poked her head back around the door and said, "Look, I'm sorry, everyone, but I have to go. I've been called in. Donna, you're in charge. Melissa, that includes you too. Do what Donna says. I'll see you shortly!"

Donna, Harold and Freya waved her off, before turning to Melissa, who was nearly bursting with curiosity.

"What was that about?" she demanded.

Harold explained, as patiently as he could. "Mum's been called in as a consultant for Torchwood Epsilon. It happens quite often. She's sort of an expert on alien weapons."

"Sounds dangerous," Melissa commented mildly.

Donna grinned proudly. "It'd take more than an alien bomb to kill Mum. She once met the Devil and survived."

"We have no proof that it was the Devil!" Harold snapped. Freya rolled her eyes. This was a longstanding argument: Harold didn't believe in the Devil, while Donna, since her parents had met him, did.

"She _met the Devil_?" Melissa's jaw dropped.

Freya sighed, and resigned herself to spending the better part of an hour telling a convoluted story involving a planet in geostationary orbit around a black hole, the Devil, a time-travelling alien, and her mother, with numerous interjections from Melissa (mostly along the lines of "That's not possible!").

* * *

Rose and John still hadn't returned a few hours later. Despite the knowledge that Rose was "indestructible" (as Freya put it), the siblings were worried about them both.

Donna decided they ought to have a distraction, to stop them from dwelling on it too much. "Freya," she suggested, "why don't you play for us?"

Freya shrugged and started to fit the pieces of her clarinet together.

"Or you could sing," Harold tried, but Freya shook her head stubbornly. Harold was certain that Freya would be a good singer, but Freya refused to even attempt it.

Soon a highly simplified version of the Ode to Joy was drifting through the room. Melissa shifted in her seat.

"This is stupid," she complained. "I bet _I _could play better than this."

"Be fair!" snapped Donna. "She's six years old! And I have yet to find another six-year-old who could even get a tune out of a clarinet!"

"Try it, then," Harold challenged Melissa. "If you think you could do better, then go ahead."

"No, don't," Freya objected. "You might break the reed." She met Melissa's eyes. "If you don't want to listen, go somewhere else."

"Fine," Melissa retorted, and stormed off, heading for the lounge.

"You might want to go after her before she breaks something," Freya suggested.

Donna and Harold looked at each other. Then Donna looked at Freya and noted that she wanted to be left alone to practise in peace.

"Alright then," she said pointedly. "Come on, Harold."

* * *

Half an hour later, Donna had managed to calm Melissa down, and the two girls were watching a film together. Harold was on the other side of the room, half watching the film and half surfing the internet. Freya hadn't reappeared, although the clarinet could sometimes be heard when the film was quiet, playing strange little snatches of melody.

On screen, the hero pulled the heroine into a passionate kiss. Harold grimaced and looked away from the TV, but Donna and Melissa kept watching. The music swelled into a crescendo, all sweeping violins and soaring flutes, and the hero took the heroine into his arms…

And then a clarinet came in, picking out the tune of the other instruments, but inducing a sudden feeling of… danger! Donna stiffened in her seat. Was it Freya giving them a warning? But how could Freya know what would happen?

"Something's about to happen," Donna said shakily. "Something bad."

Then a single gunshot rang out across the room.

The hero of the film collapsed in the heroine's arms. She began to cry. Melissa looked teary too, but Donna was just relieved. The clarinet had just been part of the soundtrack for the film, there to introduce a sense of foreboding to the scene. There was no real danger.

Donna leaned back in her seat to enjoy the rest of the film. The heroine's brother had gone to track down the man who shot her boyfriend. Donna wondered idly why the heroine didn't go herself.

She smiled at Harold, whose thoughts were still a little worried. They weren't in any danger. They could all just relax…

And then a beam of white light stabbed down through the ceiling, and Harold and Melissa were being dragged away by it in different directions, and she was being pulled in a third.

And then Freya's clarinet playing broke off suddenly, and Donna's last conscious thought was, _Please, don't let them have Freya too!_

Then, nothing.


	11. Panic

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**11: Panic**

"Well, judging by the white light - and my headache - that was a transmat beam, not a teleport. But I'm not entirely sure…"

"Oh, for God's sake, Harry, don't start licking stuff!"

"I wasn't going to!"

The world swam back into focus and Melissa looked around. She was lying on the dirt-covered floor of what was possibly the _filthiest_ room she'd ever been in. The only light came in through a skylight in the roof and a small window in the door, but that was quite enough to see the state of the room by. Donna and her annoying brother were standing by the door looking as if this was a perfectly routine occurrence.

"What's going on?" she demanded, struggling to get off the floor without touching it further. "Where am I?"

"You think we _know_ that?" snapped Harold - yes, _that_ was his name.

Donna stepped between them, raising her arms. "Alright, people, this isn't the time for arguing. We've been kidnapped! Let's _get a bit of perspective in here, please_?"

She was right, of course. Melissa smiled and nodded to her. On the other side of the room, Harold was also smiling and nodding. Then he frowned suddenly and muttered something in Donna's ear, which made Donna look a bit worried.

Harold then resumed glaring at Melissa as if this was all her fault. _Why is he doing that?_ Melissa wondered. _There's no point in arguing. After all, we've been kidnapped. He ought to look at the bigger picture._

Wait… if they'd been kidnapped, then maybe it _was_ her fault.

_Donna's right,_ she thought, _we have to stay calm. Besides, it'll be a lot more impressive. Those two don't seem to have worked it out yet…_

"I'm sorry you two got caught up in this," she said sweetly.

Donna looked surprised. "I was just about to say the same to _you_," she returned.

"Yeah," muttered Harold. "I'm sorry _you're_ here. The only good thing about being kidnapped is getting away from Donna's idiot friends."

Donna ignored that, so Melissa did too. "But we were only kidnapped because of _me_," she explained, enjoying the chance to show she knew more than Donna did. "I'm Lord Cole's granddaughter. It's _obvious_."

"Melissa…?" asked Harold cautiously.

"Yes?" Melissa managed to be civil to him.

"Shut up."

Melissa stared at him in outrage. Donna hastily explained before she could respond, which was probably a good thing. It was never a good idea to insult your hosts, even if they _did_ insult you first.

"Melissa, they used transmat beams," she explained. "They _can't_ be human. And why would an alien be interested in some lord's granddaughter? They're after Torchwood, through Mum and Dad. They must have thought _you_ were Freya."

"Speaking which," added Harold, "Has anyone _seen_ Freya?"

"Maybe they didn't get her?" suggested Melissa tentatively, half worried that her suggestion would be dismissed by the siblings. After all, they seemed to know so much more about this sort of thing.

Donna nodded and sighed. "Well, we must be grateful for small mercies, I suppose," she murmured.

Yes, that was exactly what it was. A small mercy. Because right now, Donna decided, she had too much to worry about as it was. If her baby sister had been here too, she might have gone mad. And if a telepath went mad…

_OK… calm down, Donna,_ she thought to herself._ Breathe in… and out. In… and out._

_No, not working._

_New tactic: list your problems. OK then. Where to start?_

_1: I've been kidnapped by a bunch of aliens and am now trapped in a cell somewhere._

_2: I don't have a clue who the aliens are or what they want, or even where I am. And I hate not knowing things._

_3: Melissa's here. And it's so _annoying _having to explain everything to her! Not to mention Harry has suddenly decided to pick a fight with her._

_4: Freya's _not_ here. That ought to be a good thing, but I have no way of knowing _where_ she is. If the aliens have her too, but she's been separated from us, it can't be good. What if…_

_No, calm down. A young telepath without control over her - or his - emotions is a danger._

_And speaking of telepathy and danger…_

_5: I think I just subconsciously hypnotised Harry and Melissa._

_I didn't mean to do it. I just wanted them to stop arguing. And once I'd done it I sensed I'd done _something_, but I couldn't tell what. It was Harry who actually worked out I'd tried hypnotism._

_And that scares me too. I can't control this hypnotism. I can't even tell when I've done it. What happens if I tell someone to _get lost_ and - because of hypnotism - they take me literally? What happens if I tell someone to _go and hang himself_?_

_I need to stop thinking about this. If my emotions overspill onto Harry and Melissa, it won't be pretty. Especially since my main emotion at the moment is panic._

Melissa was starting to get scared. She didn't know a thing about aliens, or spaceships or transmats or any of the other things Donna and Harold talked about like they were everyday matters. And even though the siblings talked like alien experts, Harold was looking just as scared as Melissa felt, and Donna was just staring off into space, lost in thought.

And if _they_ were worried, what chance did _she_ stand? Absolutely none at all. They would all be killed by whatever aliens these were, and probably eaten afterwards. Or made into rocket fuel. And Melissa didn't want to die!

"Calm down," said Donna distantly. "Breathe in… and out."

She was more talking to herself than to the others in the room, but Melissa obeyed all the same - and was surprised to find the panic lessening.

"Right, now we've got that sorted," said Harold irritably, "what now?" He glared at Donna; he knew exactly what had been happening over the last ten minutes. First Donna had hypnotised them by accident, then she had come close to losing control over her emotions… None of it was her fault, but all the same…

"Well, I've got something alien that evidently our kidnappers don't know about," said Donna, for Melissa's benefit. And after all, it wasn't exactly a lie. "I don't think I could contact Mum or Dad with it: they have ways to block it." _Meaning they can keep their minds shielded from mental assaults._ "But I _think _I could reach Freya…"

But should she do it? She wasn't entirely in control of her abilities at the moment. Something could go wrong.

_Do it!_ Harry was thinking. _I trust you. _It was written so clearly in his face Donna wondered if she really was using her telepathy to see it.

_Just get us out of here! _Melissa thought, and it was almost a scream.

So Donna closed her eyes and opened her mind, and she heard her mental shout echoing through the room.

_**Freya!**_


	12. Echoes of Song

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**12: Echoes of Song**

Freya closed her eyes and raised her clarinet to her lips. There was music running through her head, and she wanted to hear it out loud. She couldn't play all of it, she knew that. It was too dangerous. But she could play phrases, and so she did. She picked out the melody line of the symphony playing in her mind, and the physical clarinet and the mental orchestra merged together until she couldn't tell which instrument she was playing, or whether she was playing at all.

She could never have done it in front of anyone else. This music was Freya's secret. Her very own private orchestra, playing a piece that didn't exist, with her as lead clarinet - or was she conducting, now? Was she playing at all?

She was enthralled, immersed in the music: the orchestra, the clarinet, the soprano singer…

Wait. Soprano singer?

The music broke off suddenly, and Freya opened her eyes. Had she been singing?

But no, the clarinet was still in her hands, still held to her lips. The singer had been part of the imaginary orchestra.

But a few minutes later, maybe she _would_ have put the clarinet down and started to sing. And no good would come of that. The song was dangerous, too dangerous. If Freya had started to sing, terrible things would have happened. Even to keep playing while the imaginary soprano sang could have caused trouble.

Freya sighed and put her clarinet down. She shouldn't play any more. She'd almost lost herself completely to the music. To the singing. She'd go and join Donna, Harold and Melissa, watch a bit of that pointless film, and try and forget the music.

She concentrated, blocking out the last strains of song and listening for the other sounds of the house.

It was quiet. Too quiet.

No one else would have noticed it. The film was still playing; she could hear a gunfight and a woman crying. But Freya had just been playing, and her hearing was still unnaturally clear from listening to the imaginary symphony.

Even when most people thought they were being silent, they still made noises: the faint rustling of the seat they were sitting on as they moved slightly, their soft footsteps as they walked. And now, Freya could hear all of that.

Except that there wasn't any.

She was alone.

Freya had started heading for the living room before she even realised that. She'd been wondering about the silence for a while, but not given conscious thought to it. Once she'd got there, she found the film still blaring from the TV in the corner, but the room was empty, just as she'd thought. Absently, she crossed the room and turned the TV off.

Then the first sob burst out of her, and then she couldn't contain her emotions any longer. She sank to the floor and wept, because what chance did _she_ stand against people who could pluck her siblings out of the house without leaving a single trace behind? She was just Freya, Freya Jennifer Smith, perfectly normal six-year-old. All she could do was listen.

Freya choked out something that even she couldn't understand and kicked her clarinet case (which she hadn't bothered to put down as she rushed into the room) across the floor. If she hadn't been playing, she would have heard it happen, she was sure. The faint hiss of a transmat beam, or the whoosh of a teleport, and Melissa probably would have screamed…

But no… Freya forced herself to calm down and think more rationally. When playing, she could divide her attention so that she was concentrating both on the notes she was playing and the sounds she could hear. She ought to have heard it happen, even though she was playing.

So that meant it wasn't her playing that was to blame. And the moment Freya realised that, she knew instinctively what _was_.

The singing. It had to be. Whenever she heard it, there was danger around. And she never heard it unless she was completely immersed in music, to the effect that all external stimuli were blocked out.

She'd heard it _because_ there was danger. If she had sung, she would have influenced events, but she didn't know how, so she refused to even listen. She could easily do much more harm than good.

But because she'd heard the singing, she hadn't heard Donna, Harold and Melissa disappear. And that meant there hadn't been any chance for her to help. So there was the choice: sing, and affect events, even though it might make things worse? Or stay silent, and lose any chance of helping her siblings?

But it wasn't like she had the choice now, in any case. The singing was gone, and with it any chance to help. There was nothing she could do.

She didn't know how long she sat there, listening out for the slightest sounds, trying to think of something - _anything_ - that might help. All she knew was that when she did hear something, her heels had gone numb because she'd been sitting on them for so long.

The _something_ was a shout, loud but echoing as if it had travelled a long distance. A shout in Donna's voice. A shout that wasn't a vocal shout, but a mental one.

_**Freya!**_

_Donna?_ Freya asked mentally. Part of her wondered whether she was going mad; the rest, however, knew what Donna could do.

_**It's me.**_The response was quieter than that first shout, but still louder than Freya's mental voice. It was, after all, being transmitted over a great distance.

_Where are you?_

If it was possible for a mental voice to look sheepish, Donna managed it. But then again, the Smith family didn't believe in _impossible_. _**I don't know,**_ she admitted. _**In a cell somewhere. With Harold and Melissa. And before you ask, I don't know who kidnapped us either, but Harry said they used a transmat beam, not a teleport. You should call Mum and Dad. Tell them what happened.**_

Now it was Freya's turn to sound sheepish. _Do you know their mobile numbers? I don't._

_**They're on my phone, which should be - **_Suddenly Donna's concentration faltered. Her mental voice fragmented into a series of impressions: _**white light Harry voice shouting Donna why eyes open Harry nervous Melissa scared new woman Harry worried woman not moving dark hair eyes closed new why how who… **_The connection between the two of them was abruptly severed.

Freya stayed where she was for another minute, hoping that Donna would re-establish it, but nothing came. So, wincing at her stiffness, she got up and began to search the house for Donna's mobile. In the end she found it, in the pocket of the jacket Donna had abandoned on Harold's bedroom floor. Quickly she searched through the phonebook and selected her mum's number.

After a few seconds, the dialling tone stopped, but nothing replaced it. No human voice, no recorded message. Not even the faint sounds which would indicate someone had picked up but was not saying anything. Nothing.

"Mum?" said Freya into the terrible silence. "_Mum?_"


	13. All I Ever Wanted

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**13: All I Ever Wanted**

"It's a bomb," said Jake Simmonds bluntly. "Not a meteor, a bomb. Dropped deliberately, as far as we know, but it never went off. We can't find any sort of timer either, so here's what I want to know: is it going to blow up any time soon? And if so, what'll set it off?"

Rose nodded her understanding. She'd seen bombs like this before, or at least she thought she had. There was a scanner on them somewhere, primed to set off the bomb when given a certain trigger. This could be anything from a specific word to a shower of rain.

She checked the readings from Jake's scientists, and used them to half work out, half guess where the scanner was hidden. "There'll be a panel somewhere near the top," she told the Epsilon team at large. "There's a scanner underneath it. It won't be hard to find. These things are _meant_ to be opened."

Rose didn't go near the panel herself. She had a bad feeling about this, although she wasn't normally that sort of person. She glanced around for _Bad Wolf_ signs, just in case, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

"Found it!" called one of the scientists.

"Energy scanner," the other elaborated. "No idea what _sort_ of energy, though."

"Nothing terrestrial," agreed the first scientist. "Why would anyone drop a bomb that'd never explode?"

"An accident?" suggested Jake. "Or a decoy? Or maybe something at the base will activate it?"

Rose skirted round the bomb - taking care not to touch it - to see the scientists' findings. Jake peered over her shoulder. Rose didn't recognise the data, and didn't think Jake did either.

But then the relevant figures swam before her eyes and changed into BAD WOLF - just for a second, but she saw them. And she understood.

"Huon energy," she said shakily, turning to look at Jake's team.

"Rose?" asked Jake uncertainly. "What's huon energy? And what's Bad Wolf?"

"It's me," said Rose, and she heard her voice echoing as if from a long way off. "That bomb is meant for me."

* * *

"I tell you, you _were_ here before! Look!" John found the security footage from when the Anax had last visited, showing them the screen. They watched it as if it were completely new to them.

There had only been three last time, John noted. This time there were six, but they were acting exactly the same. Well, they were a hive-mind species; that was to be expected.

"_How shall we catalogue you?_" The Anax had finished with the video and were looking around them. Did that mean they accepted what it told them? Probably not, John decided.

"Humans," he replied, getting a bit impatient now. "I've already told you. And you've already catalogued us."

"_That's_ diplomacy," muttered Yvonne from where she was sitting, on the other side of the room.

"_No,_" the Anax corrected him."_Where shall we catalogue _you_?_"

"What do you _mean_?" demanded John, although he had a pretty good idea what. But if they knew that, then that meant they had a much deeper level of telepathy than he had first assumed. It meant they could skim through his mind at will, and he couldn't sense them doing it at all.

And _that_ meant he might be in trouble, and so might Rose, Donna, Harold, Freya, and a lot of other people.

"_These people are human, yes,_" the Anax agreed. "_But you are not._"

Damn.

* * *

"You've got to leave," Rose said firmly. "Go back to the road. Get out of the blast radius. The bomb ought to have a fairly small range. You'll be alright."

"Rose!" Jake grabbed her shoulders, pulling her away from the bomb. "You can't do this!"

Rose smiled thinly. "I'll be fine," she lied, and Jake could tell she was lying, that she was scared. "Indestructible, remember?"

"You don't have to do this," Jake persisted. "We can take it back to the archives. As long as you don't touch it, it won't explode."

Rose sighed. "It's not that simple," she explained. "The sensor will get stronger over time. One day, one of my descendants will be in that building, and the sensor will detect them, and the whole building will go up."

"But –"

"I'll be fine, I've got a teleport. Just go!"

Once she was alone, Rose made her way over to the bomb. She knew in theory, she'd be fine. She could survive anything. Indestructible.

But she'd never taken her own life before. All her other deaths had been accidental. This one was more like a sacrifice. What if this time, she really _was_ going to die?

There was no time to dither. Rose lifted the panel over the scanner, closed her eyes and pressed her hand to it.

The world erupted into flames around her.

Everything went black.

Then her vision filled with golden light.

And then she was drawing in a great gasping breath, and she was lying in the back of Jake's jeep, with his medic leaning over her.

"She's alive!" he cried, and then everyone was crowding around her with exclamations and offers and questions. Rose put her head in her hands.

"All I ever wanted was a normal life," she sighed.

* * *

"I'm human!" John insisted. "Look at me! Do I look like an alien? Martha, examine me. Prove it!"

Martha Milligan picked up a handheld medical scanner, which some alien had left behind for Epsilon to find and use. She pointed it at him, running it up and down a few times, and studied the results.

"Human," she said. Her voice sounded very loud in the hush that had fallen over the room.

John smiled in relief, because he'd been almost sure that was how it would work out. His body was human, but his mind was not. The Anax knew he was alien, but no one could prove it.

"What are you smiling at?" demanded Yvonne Hartman. She turned to Martha. "He's tricking us, I'm sure of it! He's fooling the scanner somehow! He deals with technology; he could easily tamper with it!"

"Yvonne, don't be ridiculous," Martha insisted. "We haven't got any proof he's alien." She wished Ianto was here – even Yvonne listened to Ianto. It was something about the way he spoke – but this was a weekend. The only people in the base were John, Yvonne and herself.

"He's alien!" Yvonne insisted, her eyes wild. John looked up at the Anax, and realised suddenly that _they_ were doing this: getting rid of a potential danger.

His wife was probably in danger, and maybe his children were as well. One of his employees had gone crazy, and the other was just standing there looking helpless. A race of aliens had faked memory loss in order to eliminate anyone who might pose a threat to them… John groaned inwardly.

"All I ever wanted was a normal life."


	14. Answers

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**14: Answers**

The world abruptly flickered back into visibility, and Gwen looked around blearily. One minute she'd been in the Hub at Torchwood Gamma, the next she was… where?

She looked around surreptitiously, trying not to alert whoever was there that she was awake. It was obviously a cell of some kind, and it probably hadn't been used for a while. Three figures were watching her, looking concerned: a stocky blonde girl, a gangly ginger boy and a slim dark-haired girl. Gwen guessed they were all around eleven years old.

She could understand her own kidnapping, but why would aliens concern themselves with _children_?

"She's awake," announced the blonde, just as Gwen decided there was no point in faking unconsciousness any more.

Gwen sat up and looked around properly. _Definitely a cell,_ she noted. _Could be anywhere_. "What happened?" she asked, deciding to play helpless. If the cell was bugged, it would be best not to mention Torchwood.

The dark-haired girl shrugged. "We were kidnapped," she said with a trace of an upper-class accent. "Right out of Donna's living-room… What _is_ the world coming to, I ask you?"

"Where'd they get you?" asked the boy, presumably hoping to cut off a rant from the dark-haired girl.

"Cardiff," Gwen replied vaguely.

"Torchwood Gamma?" asked the blonde girl casually. Gwen felt herself go pale.

"It's alright," the boy advised her, equally casually. "There aren't any bugs in the room. Well, I don't know… probably a lot of the live sort around here, but -"

"How do you know about Torchwood?" demanded Gwen, reaching for her gun on impulse, although she didn't really expect it to be there. (It wasn't.)

In answer the blonde sat down next to her, holding her hands out to show she was unarmed, and smiled widely. "Sorry, I don't think we've been introduced," she said politely, and Gwen stared at her in amazement. "I'm Donna Smith; this is my brother Harold and my friend Melissa. And you are?"

"Gwen Cooper," said Gwen, realising that one more piece of information wouldn't do any damage. Not to mention, she thought she recognised two of the names… "Aren't you two Rose and John's children? Torchwood Alpha?"

"Yep!" said the boy called Harold. He really was insanely cheerful for this sort of situation, Gwen thought… then again, she'd heard his father John was just the same in a crisis.

Gwen looked at the three of them. Donna and Harold Smith, quite calm, looking around the cell for anything that might be helpful. And Melissa, who at least wasn't panicking.

_Ok,_ she thought, _imagine it's a training exercise. Two Torchwood trainees and a civilian, and I have to get them to safety._

She stood up and took charge. "Alright then everyone, what are our assets?"

* * *

A green light lit up on one of the screens and letters began to flash: CALL INCOMING. Yvonne stared at it. Slowly, her eyes came back into focus.

"Well, isn't anyone going to get that?" she demanded, marching over to the screen. John and Martha exchanged glances and sighed with relief: who knew what Yvonne would have done next?

Suzie Costello, head of Torchwood Gamma, appeared on the screen. "Took you long enough!" she snapped.

"We were in the middle of negotiations!" retorted Yvonne.

"Well, never mind _negotiation_, we've got a hostile force on our hands! One of my team has been kidnapped!"

John sighed; he'd been expecting that. He headed over to the screen, meaning to step in and explain what he knew, but before he got there, his phone rang.

"Hello?" he asked uncertainly.

"Dad!" Freya's words spilled out of her in a flood of anxiety. "Donna, Harold and Melissa have disappeared but Donna managed to contact me and she said they were in a cell but all together and Harold thought it was a transmat and I tried to call Mum but I didn't get anything so I called you and I don't know what to _do_!"

John took a deep breath to calm himself down. He had been expecting this too, but the news was still a shock. "Alright, Freya," he said, keeping his voice steady. "It's ok. Thanks for calling me. Stay in the house and you'll be fine. I'm going to get Donna and Harold back, and Melissa."

"What about Mum?" asked Freya softly.

"Mum… will be fine," replied John, and rang off. _Of course Rose will be alright,_ he thought frantically. _She _has_ to be._

Then he stepped forwards and took centre stage. He owed everyone an explanation.

"Suzie," John began. "Your kidnapped employee is Gwen Cooper. She was taken by a transmat beam which picked her out specifically. And since you're panicking, I'm guessing that she was in the Hub at the time… blimey, I feel like Sherlock Holmes! Am I right so far?"

Suzie nodded, looking alarmed.

"Two of my children have also been taken. So has their friend, who I expect they got by accident instead of Freya. Gwen was taken because she's from an old Cardiff family, affected by the Rift. My children were taken for their possible abilities."

Martha, Suzie and Yvonne exchanged confused looks at his last statement. John ignored them and continued talking.

"The meteorite was a decoy for Rose, but it was more than that. It was there to… to eliminate her. And Yvonne was meant to eliminate me, too. She was being controlled; they were influencing her reactions and emotions. But she broke free." He turned to Yvonne. "You did your duty for Queen and country," he murmured, smiling as if at a private joke - but the smile faded quickly.

"They wanted us out of the way because there was no other way they could get to our children. I escaped by luck - they could just as easily have chosen Martha. Rose…"

"But what aliens are we dealing with?" Martha interrupted, to save him saying that out loud. "All you've said so far is _they_."

"Do you even _know_?" asked Yvonne pointedly.

"It was _them_!" announced John, pointing accusatorially at the Anax. Martha jumped: for the past few minutes they had been blending into the background surprisingly successfully considering their bright orange colouring.

"How _dare_ you accuse -" Yvonne began, sounding scandalised. John didn't give her a chance to continue.

"Think, Yvonne!" he exclaimed. "They're looking for telepathic beings to fight in this war they're about to have. They had ample time to pick my mind the first time they were here - and at the mention of telepathy I thought of my children and of Gwen Cooper. They've got the technology and manpower necessary to pluck Gwen right out of the Hub, and -" He stopped. The air was quite literally thick with the tension - several telepathic beings in an enclosed space could have that effect. Hostility was rolling off them in waves.

John stepped forwards to face the Anax. "Go on, then," he said, "since I know so much…" He felt the familiar exhilaration run over him, making him feel more like the Doctor than John Smith. So he said something that only the Doctor said, because it was so stupid and alien:

"Take me to your leader!"


	15. They Don't Matter

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter

**15: They Don't Matter**

The first thing that came to Harold's mind when he thought of assets was: _Well, I've got a banana and at a pinch you could put up some shelves._ Donna almost laughed, but her good mood faded quickly. She had problems of her own to deal with. Namely: should she tell Gwen about her powers?

"Help's on the way," she said instead. "I managed to get a message to my sister. She'll tell Mum and Dad."

Gwen gave her a piercing look. "And how exactly did you send this message?" she asked.

"I…" Donna made up her mind quickly. "I can't tell you. I'm sorry."

Gwen was about to say something more, but then the door of the cell swung open. Standing in the doorway was a tall, thin orange creature. Donna recognised it from her parents' memories as one of the Anax. Strangely, she couldn't read its mind at all.

The alien looked at each of them in turn, and then suddenly they all felt… good. Like they were doing the right thing by following it out of the cell and down the corridor. The idea of escape was pointless and stupid; why would they want to get away anyway? They were _meant _to do this.

Donna, who was last in the line, frantically tried to remember what else she could do. There had been something, she was sure. Another option.

But she just couldn't remember.

* * *

Freya lay on the floor, clutching Donna's mobile, desperately trying her mother's number again and again. "Mum!" she sobbed. "Mum! Please!"

Nothing.

* * *

"Well, I have to say," John commented, struggling to appear casual, "these are really some of the best handcuffs I've been put in in my time. Nothing a sonic screwdriver couldn't get me out of, mind you. I remember this one time on Satellite Five, the Editor put me in - Harold! Donna!"

They were being led into the room by one of the Anax, along with Donna's friend Melissa and one of Torchwood Gamma's operatives. Strangely, they didn't appear to be struggling; they were just following it, not even looking around.

_It's done something to their minds,_ John realised, horrified. He sensed rather than saw the Anax's pleasure at his horror, which they picked up from his mind.

The Anax led its four prisoners to stand next to where John was chained to the wall of the ship. They stood looking uncaringly down at the rest of the control room, which was large and made of an orange-tinted metal. Actually, "control room" was a bit of a misnomer, John thought, since there weren't actually any controls, just hundreds of Anax. Perhaps the ship was flown telekinetically, he decided.

He forced himself to think of telekinetic ships, just so his captors wouldn't have the pleasure of feeling his fear. But his thoughts just kept turning back to where he was, and the danger his children were in, and Rose…

"You've made a mistake!" he insisted. "We're not telepathic! Let my children go!"

Several of the Anax drifted closer to John, tasting his panic. All of them seemed to be enjoying it, sharing each other's perceptions of the emotions. To increase them even more, the Anax made Donna step forward, and began to interrogate her.

"_Who did you contact telepathically?_" they began.

"Freya Smith, my sister," Donna replied calmly; the Anax were still controlling her thoughts and emotions.

"_Why did you do this?_"

"Because she could contact my parents, and I thought they could help me."

"_Your father is our prisoner._"

Slowly, Donna turned to face John.

"Donna!" he shouted, the moment she met his eyes. "Donna, you have to resist! Fight back!"

Donna turned back to the Anax.

"He doesn't matter," she replied calmly.

"Donna!" John cried. Even though he knew she was being influenced by the Anax, the betrayal still hurt.

One of the Anax turned and looked at him - just looked, nothing more - and John found himself unable to speak. He struggled as hard as he could, but it was impossible to break free. Resigned to watching in silence, he fell still.

"_Your mother is dead._"

"She doesn't matter."

Was it John's imagination, or had Donna hesitated a little before replying? Was she slowly breaking their control?

"_Your sister cannot help you._"

A screen in the middle of the room, which John hadn't noticed before, lit up to show an image of Freya. She was lying on the living room floor, clinging to Donna's phone and crying. Her voice issued from invisible speakers, faint but still recognisably Freya's. "Mum! Mum!"

John fought even harder, but to no avail.

"She doesn't matter," Donna said clearly.

A sigh seemed to run through all of the Anax in unison as they experienced John's distress.

"_Your sister is useless. She can do nothing._"

_She's _six _years old, you idiots!_ John wanted to scream at the Anax. But of course, since they were telepathic, they knew that anyway.

"_Your brother is not telepathic and this friend knows nothing,_" the Anax continued.

"They don't matter."

"_Who is this woman?_"

"She isn't telepathic. I don't know her."

The Anax turned to smile at John. "_Watch and learn, alien. Your daughter has given us permission to do this._" They paused to taste his emotions once again, then continued, "_Donna Smith's mind shall be superseded, merged with our own. She will become one with us, and her strength will aid us in the fight. We will keep you alive, since you feel so strongly. Your emotions will feed us. But the rest of the world, starting with these useless beings here, will join our army. Their minds will be wiped, and we shall control their bodies. And you, alien, will watch._"

Under their control, Gwen Cooper stepped forwards and saluted the assembled Anax. One of them approached her, hands outstretched. Once it touched her face, John knew, her mind would be crushed. And there was nothing he could do.

And then, when the member of the Anax was just close enough to touch her, Gwen snapped out of the salute. The hand which had been raised to her forehead punched the alien in the neck, and it fell backwards.

Pandemonium broke out.

The Anax's concentration slipped, and the room suddenly tilted alarmingly. Several warning sirens came on, all clashing with each other. Lights pulsed from the walls, and one began to glow orange all over. John found himself able to speak again, and Harold and Melissa blinked and looked around. Melissa's screams soon added to the noise in the control room.

"_You have betrayed us!_" the Anax shrieked at Donna.

"I told the truth," Donna said, still in the same calm tone, staring straight ahead. "She is not telepathic. She is clairvoyant. But she is still strong enough to resist your control."

"_**How could you do this?**_" the Anax screamed. Everyone in the room flinched from the mental blow - except Donna, who stood perfectly still. Her voice carried across the control room with complete clarity, although she didn't seem to be shouting at all:

"You don't matter."


	16. The Whole World Revolves

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**16: The Whole World Revolves…**

Winds began to swirl around Donna, filling the room, bringing a faint golden glow with them. She did not react in any way, but it was clear that she was causing them. She stood in the centre of the room, with the winds blowing all around her, completely unaffected. Not even her hair caught in the gusts.

Then the wind picked up, spiralling around the room with the speed of a gale. Donna, at the eye of the storm, was unaffected, but everything else was caught up in it. The room filled with the shrieks of the Anax as they were tossed around in the vortex, little more than orange blurs.

Harold, Melissa and Gwen fought their way over to John and grabbed hold of him. For the first time John was grateful for his handcuffs, which were keeping him - and, therefore, the others - anchored to the wall. The wind might not have been harming Donna, but it certainly wasn't making any distinction between the Anax and their prisoners.

The screen with Freya's image was similarly anchored. Her voice could no longer be heard, but her lips were moving, her face close to the camera. "Mum!" she was mouthing.

"Donna!" John screamed over the roar of the winds. "You can stop now!"

Donna didn't so much as look at him. "You don't matter," she replied calmly - or did she say it? Was she just projecting her thoughts? The screams of the Anax were messing with John's head.

Then, through the golden wind and the orange streaks that were Anax, John caught sight of a certain section of the wall. It had begun glowing orange when all the other warning lights and sirens went off, and he hadn't given a thought to it since. But now, although all the other alarms had been turned off, this wall was still glowing. If anything, it was even brighter.

It wasn't really the same shade of orange as the rest of the ship, was it? It was more like amber than orange, in fact. And… was that _smoke_ coming from it?

Abruptly, the panel of wall exploded in a blaze of amber light.

"Well, not quite what I was looking for, but I guess it worked," a familiar voice commented through the dust. Standing just outside the range of the howling winds, and holding the Master's laser screwdriver, stood…

"Rose?" breathed John.

"Did you miss me?" she asked pertly, putting the laser screwdriver back into her pocket, which was probably the safest place for it. After all, when she'd tried to open the door it had blown up the wall.

John rolled his eyes at that comment. Then again, he was probably justified in doing so. "You think you're so impressive!" he challenged her.

"I am so impressive!" she retorted. The two shared a smile.

"Is this really the time?" Gwen Cooper demanded from her position clinging to John's leg in the wind.

"Yes, it is!" Harold shouted back. "Didn't you see, just then? I think Donna smiled!"

Rose put two and two together. "It's the memories!" she called. "It must be! She's heard all our stories -"

In her excitement, she stepped forwards, just one step - but that was enough. In an instant, she was whipped off her feet, into the storm.

"Mum!" Harold cried, and tried to reach for her. But as he let go with one hand, the winds pulled him away from his father. He knocked into Gwen and Melissa, sending all three of them flying, with John screaming their names but unable to help.

The four of them fought to be free of the winds, but in vain. Their cries added to the chaos as they were knocked into each other and the Anax.

"Don't fight it!" Gwen yelled. "Go with the flow!"

Tentatively, Rose relaxed into the winds. Immediately, she found herself hurtling around the room even faster, but no longer being blown into things.

John knew that, chained to the wall as he was, there was no way he could help them directly. Instead, hoping desperately that they were alright, he closed his eyes and began to remember.

Because of what he and Rose had said a few minutes ago, he found his mind drifting back to the first times they'd met, in his ninth incarnation.

"_I don't even know your name."_

"_Yes you do. It's the Doctor."_

"_Just "the Doctor?" "_

"_Just the Doctor."_

"_The Doctor."_

"_Hello!" He waved the plastic arm at her - that _stupid_ arm! "Armless," he'd called it. She'd taken it home with her after that shop blew up, and he'd gone and tracked it down later, and it'd nearly killed both of them. And then he'd told her about that later, and she'd said:_

"_Oh, so you're saying the whole world revolves around you, then?"_

"_Sort of, yeah."_

"_You're full of it!"_

"_Sort of, yeah."_

_That was it,_ he realised, _about the world revolving. The second time he'd taken Rose's hand, the time he'd realised it fit perfectly in his - but that wasn't as important now. What _was_ important was the winds blowing around Donna, and his own memories of the Earth revolving…_

He sneaked one more quick look at the room (nothing had changed), then threw himself back into his memories.

_It's like what you were saying. About the Earth revolving. The world is turning on its axis at over a thousand miles per hour, and the whole planet is hurtling through space at a speed of sixty-seven _thousand_ miles per hour… and I can feel it. The turn of the Earth… The sun and moon, the day and night… why do they hurt? Why? Why, why, why, why, why why why why why why why why why - I'm fine!_

_Wait a minute, _John realised, _that wasn't my thoughts!_

He opened his eyes again, noticing that the wind was no longer tugging at his legs, although it was still whipping past his face. Rose, Harold, Melissa and Gwen were also standing on their feet, and the screaming blurs that were Anax were somehow not being blown into them.

And Donna was looking around the control room at the howling, spiralling winds with a confused expression on her face.

"What just happened?" she asked the room at large.


	17. Tying Up the Loose Ends

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**17: Tying Up the Loose Ends**

John and Rose looked at each other. How could they explain to Donna what had just happened? She'd broken out of the Anax's control, but they had retained their hold on her emotions. As the Daleks and Cybermen had proved, an emotionless warrior was a powerful destructive force. Armed with her telepathic powers, Donna had gone on to attack her family along with the Anax, believing they didn't matter.

How could they tell that to their own daughter?

"You saved us," John said finally. "You broke the Anax's control and defeated them telepathically - you saved us, Donna!"

"I did?" Donna asked, confused. The last thing she remembered was one of the Anax coming into her cell and looking at her.

"You did, sweetheart," her mother confirmed. She looked tired, and there were scorch marks on her suit.

Donna frowned. "Why aren't you looking me in the eye?" she asked quietly. She was beginning to understand the magnitude of what must have happened. She must have done something terrible in the course of saving her family. Did she really want to know what?

"What did I do?" she asked, her voice shaking.

"Do you really want to know?" Her father's face held its unreadable Oncoming Storm expression. His eyes were very dark.

Donna nodded stubbornly.

Silently, John met her eyes.

Also silently, Donna searched his thoughts.

No words were necessary.

"Oh," Donna said finally, very quietly, as she realised what she had done.

Then, a little louder, she added, "I… I'm sorry."

Then she burst into tears. John, Rose and Harold all rushed to comfort her, telling her that she couldn't help it, she wasn't in control of her actions, and anyway she had still saved them all.

"Mum!" sobbed Freya from the screen on the wall. John and Rose exchanged glances, and then Rose gently detached herself from Donna and crossed to the screen.

"It's alright, Freya," she said soothingly. "I'm here. You can stop now."

Freya sniffed, wiping her eyes. "Did I do alright?" she asked uncertainly.

"You did perfectly, sweetheart," Rose told her. "They didn't suspect a thing. We'll be back soon, ok?"

She turned to grin at John, who was looking extremely confused.

"I had to make the Anax think I was dead," she explained. "Surprise was the only way I could beat them, although in the end that wasn't necessary. I asked Freya to pretend when I stopped at home to pick up the screwdriver. She did even better than I expected, actually. The Anax believed so strongly they even got you doubting too!"

John stared at her. "You mean… all that worry…"

"Excuse me," Melissa began. John, Rose and Harold looked at her in surprise. They had forgotten she was there. "What exactly is going on?"

"We ought to get back," said Gwen Cooper, who had been standing and watching in silence. There was a haunted look on her face, but she was acting just as decisively as ever.

"I'm sure there's time for a few explanations," John objected, glancing at Melissa.

"No," Gwen insisted. "There isn't. Out! Now!"

Something in her face convinced them that her urgency was justified. They ran, Rose leading them out the way she had got in. They passed several melted-down doors on the way, mute evidence that Rose was not as good with a laser screwdriver as she was with sonic.

They had barely made it out of the ship when it started to shake, warning lights flashing around the melted hole they had run out of. "What's it doing?" John shouted.

"I don't know!" Rose called back. There seemed to be a lot of noise in the air, although no one could tell where it was coming from. "Maybe I tripped a self-destruct by mistake. I'm not used to this screwdriver."

"Maybe… maybe I set it off," Donna suggested, wincing at the idea.

"You did," said Gwen, so quietly that only Harold heard her over whatever the noise was. "But it's not a self-destruct," she added, as if talking to herself.

The ship - which was orange and vaguely circular - had begun to spin round, faster and faster, making a high-pitched whining noise. Suddenly, it shot straight upwards, climbing into the sky without any visible means of propulsion. It quickly vanished from sight.

"I think…" began Donna, struggling to remember what she had done earlier. "I think I sent them… _home_."

* * *

They went home themselves after that, in the van Rose had borrowed from Torchwood Epsilon to find the ship with. Gwen and Melissa went with them: Gwen out of choice, Melissa because she wasn't expected home before tomorrow evening.

In the living room, Rose served drinks and John made explanations, although they kept glancing at the laser screwdriver and losing their train of thought. In the end they gave it up as hopeless. Handing the former task over to Harold and the latter to Donna (with Gwen and Freya making interruptions), they disappeared into a side room to disassemble the screwdriver.

Gwen waited for a murmur of technobabble to start up from behind the closed door, before suggesting another round of coffees. "No, I can do it," she objected, when Harold got up to make them. She put her hand out as if to hold him back, but Harold pushed it down again and said that he didn't mind doing it himself.

"So, what happened then?" he heard Freya ask eagerly as he left the room.

He returned with a tray of coffee-cups to find Donna attempting to explain her telepathy to Melissa, with a lot of roundabout terms and hand-waving. Harold handed out the cups individually, noting Donna's questioning glance as she saw this. He tried to avoid her gaze, but Donna had always been able to read him easily.

Melissa, on the other hand, had no such abilities. She drank her coffee quickly, before sighing, yawning and falling asleep where she sat.

"What did you do?" asked Freya, glancing unsurely at Harold.

"Amnesia pill," he replied shortly, handing Gwen back the bottle she had slipped him earlier.

Gwen was staring into her coffee with a troubled expression on her face. "You drugged mine too, didn't you?" she asked, although it was more of a statement than a question. Donna looked into her eyes and understood why: Gwen's Sight had awoken, just like Gwyneth's only several generations later.

Harold nodded sheepishly in answer to Gwen. "Sorry," he said. "Nothing personal. It's just… from what I've heard of Suzie Costello, well… she's a bit too…"

"Trigger happy?" suggested Gwen. "She is, I suppose, although I never saw her like that before. But then, I didn't know about those experiments with the glove… how do I know about them now? When I think of her… I can See them. And you three…" she breathed, staring at the Smith siblings. "You'll be great one day, I can See that, too. You have such powers! But you'll need them." She turned to look at Freya, her face turning haunted. "Terrible things are going to happen, Donna. Beware of your friends, and even of your family. The changeling child… No! That won't happen! It can't happen! No, no, no!"

Gwen grasped her coffee cup and drained it, falling back on the sofa, fast asleep.

Donna, Harold and Freya sat and stared at each other in alarm.


	18. The Waiting Game

**Disclaimer:** see previous chapter.

**18: The Waiting Game**

But the weeks wore on, and nothing happened. The three siblings were constantly on the alert for anything out of the ordinary - but nothing of the sort happened, not even things that ordinary, non-Torchwood families would consider strange.

_Beware of your friends, even of your family._ Gwen's words were constantly in their minds. They were always suspicious, always worried. Donna searched people's surface thoughts constantly, gleaning the meanings behind even the most innocent remarks. Harold tried to hack the Torchwood computers to keep track of alien sightings, and he had hit his uncle Tony in the face when Tony had sneaked up on him for a joke. And Freya…

The day they had all gone back to school, she had made an announcement to the whole class. Normally a shy person, she had delivered the message for the sake of her siblings.

"If anything happens to you," she'd said, "anything at all, just come and talk to me, ok?"

She'd had plenty of takers, but nothing they'd had to say had been alien-related. They tended to talk about problems with family or friends, but Freya listened to them all, aware that even "someone acting strangely" could be the first sign of alien control.

Not that anything like that came up.

* * *

The months passed, and still nothing happened.

After much discussion, the three of them decided to tell their parents what they had heard. They were concerned, of course. But they also took it in perspective. Time was relative, especially to those with the Sight - and after all, Gwen never mentioned _when_ those things were going to happen, did she? Besides, all she had Seen was one of many possible futures. This one might never happen.

Donna stopped reading everybody all the time, restricting herself to anyone who made strange remarks. Remembering to _beware of her friends_, she read them more than anyone else, especially Melissa. She warned Yasmin to watch out for strange happenings, but didn't tell her anything else. Just in case.

Harold calmed himself down enough to stop jumping at every loud noise. He still tried to hack into the Torchwood mainframe, even though his parents now knew about Gwen's warning and so were monitoring it themselves. His father regularly disabled his back doors into the system, and Harold regularly rebuilt them and created new ones. Just in case.

Freya still listened to people. Several of her classmates had come to her to confess to things, and had realised how much it helped to have someone to talk to. Freya's name was being spread all around her primary school as a sort of Agony Aunt, although she never offered solutions of her own. Freya listened carefully to everyone, still searching for hints of alien involvement, even though she doubted there would be any. Just in case.

But there never was anything. There was no need to plan ahead.

* * *

One day, months after they had received the warning, Donna woke up and realised something. Suddenly, something in Gwen's words made a lot more sense.

But she couldn't tell anyone. They couldn't know what she was thinking. It was… unthinkable. She shouldn't even have had the idea.

But she had. And now she had thought of it, she couldn't _stop_ thinking of it.

She put it out of her mind as best she could, very grateful that she was the only one of the family who could read minds. She'd never really thought about it before, but keeping secrets from other members of her family was as good as impossible.

Harold cornered her in the hall on the way to her room that evening, having watched her closely all day. "Donna," he asked, concerned, "what's happened? You've been distracted all day. Did you find something out?"

"No," Donna said hastily. "No, it's nothing like that. No invading aliens. Nothing."

"Then what _is_ wrong?" pressed Harold. "Maybe you should talk to Freya, if you don't want to tell me."

"No," said Donna firmly.

"Why not?"

Donna looked Harold in the eye and wished for some way she could avoid telling him her suspicions. "The changeling child," she answered finally.

Harold was horrified. "Freya?" he exclaimed. "You think Gwen was warning us about _Freya_? Our own _sister_?"

"No, no!" Donna hastened to reassure him. "I don't believe it either. It can't be true, it just _can't_ be! It's just that…" She drew in a deep breath, suddenly very close to tears. "It's just it makes _sense_, Harry. It all makes sense."

She knew enough from her mother's thoughts to know that Freya hadn't been expected. She didn't look anything like either of her parents either. And Gwen had been staring at her when she gave her first warning. _Beware of your family._

It made sense.

"No," Harold insisted. "It's not true. Freya's one of us. Possible futures, remember? Gwen must have been wrong. That or we're interpreting it wrong. It's not Freya."

Donna read the certainty in his face and nodded to herself. "It's not Freya," she repeated firmly. "It's not Freya."

* * *

A year after the warning had been given, the family decided as a whole to put it behind them. After all, nothing had happened. It must just have been another possible future that never came to pass. In fact, it was likely their vigilance had _prevented_ it from happening.

Harold held out for a few months longer than the rest, still worried about Freya - although not even he could say whether he thought she was _in _danger, or whether she _was_ the danger.

But one day, after his father had disabled his latest door into the Torchwood computer systems, he sat and looked at it for a long time. And then he realised that he too thought the danger had passed. There was no need to wait any longer.

He didn't reinstate his way in. He had waited long enough.

* * *

Somebody else was waiting too. She had been ever since the night Gwen had Seen what was to come. This other person had Seen it too, and much more clearly.

Certain events had to be set in motion first, but they would happen. They would take care of themselves. There was nothing that could stop the spiral of Fate.

Nothing, that is, except one person. And the woman would have to take care of this person herself. Sometimes Fate needed a little extra help to accomplish itself.

But not yet. She had Seen when it would be. She had a few months left still to prepare herself.

Lucy Cole curled up on the couch she slept on when she wanted to dream, and resigned herself to playing the waiting game.


	19. In Which Fate Plays Out

**Disclaimer:** see previous chapter

**19: In Which Fate Plays Out**

Lucy Cole never set foot in the any part of the house except for her own wing of it, except days when all the extended family were there, when she made a point of embarrassing her brother. Her family – for the most part – accepted this. In fact, Alexander Cole would have preferred her to never come into the main house at all.

That meant, of course, that she had her own way in and out of the house – a private door from her wing of the house into the alley at the side, so small that it was completely unremarkable. Even her family had forgotten about the door's existence.

They assumed – when they thought about her at all – that she never went out, spending all her time with her paintings and other "eccentricities".

But she went out. And other people came in.

* * *

Lucy Cole stared down at the object in front of her. It was a hand-held scanner that had fallen from the sky over Cardiff right into her hands the year before. Whenever she needed something to help fulfil her destiny, she only had to go to Cardiff for it to appear. It was a sign, she knew. What she was doing _had_ to happen. It was Fate.

The scanner display flashed through the profiles of all the people passing down the road outside the window. Human, human, human, alien, human, human, human, human, human - _there_!

"_That_ one," said Lucy coldly, pointing out her target on the screen.

The figure beside her nodded, bloodlust flaring in its eyes as it studied the person she had indicated through the window.

"Make sure no one sees," Lucy cautioned it. "Allow yourself to be detected in the alley. Your prey will come to _you_."

The Shuk nodded even more eagerly. It looked like a cross between a humanoid and a large black dog. Its eyes were red, and the pupils were filled with flames.

"Go, then," Lucy commanded. The Shuk bounded away, dropping to all fours for increased speed. Lucy set the scanner to follow its progress, watching avidly as it neared its target.

There was always something intensely _satisfying_ about watching Fate taking place in front of her.

* * *

Rose had brought Donna and Freya to call on Melissa. Melissa's friendship with Donna had survived the supposed embarrassment of falling asleep in front of the TV the first time she had visited Donna's house, which was their explanation of her lack of memory for the rest of that evening.

Melissa still wasn't sure whether she believed Rose's alien stories, but she was always willing to listen to them. That was the reason for this trip. They were going to tour London, listening to the many stories of alien invasions which had taken place all over the city.

They were heading away from Melissa's house, towards the shop which had been called Henrik's in the other world, when Donna realised that Freya had stopped. The other three dropped back to see what was wrong.

"I thought I heard something," explained Freya, glancing unsurely into the alley she had stopped beside.

Melissa screamed suddenly and jumped back. There was _something_ in the alley, hiding in the shadows. Something with glowing red eyes.

Rose pulled out the sonic screwdriver, almost on reflex. Donna knew from her mind that she and John had only just finished it, and that she had been planning on testing it without his knowledge. Well, here was a chance to test it, and Donna hoped it worked, because right now it was all they had.

Well, that and Donna's abilities, of course. Donna tried to read the _thing_'s mind, but couldn't see very much beyond a vague sense of its identity. Aliens were always harder to read than humans, because they thought in different ways. Even her father had a tendency to think in circles when exploring new technology.

The _thing_ called itself a Shuk, and as far as Donna could tell it had originally come through the Rift in Cardiff. And then… had someone taken it to London? Donna sighed and shook her head. Its mind was just too confusing for her to make sense of.

"Wait there," ordered Rose, adjusting the frequency of the sonic screwdriver. She advanced slowly into the alley, holding it out in front of her.

Donna and Freya exchanged glances. An almost inaudible whisper from Donna and a glance at Freya's thoughts convinced them that they were thinking the same thing. Alert and wary, they followed their mother. Melissa stayed at the mouth of the alley, choosing to put her own life before that of her friend, but staying close all the same.

The Shuk backed away into the alley as they walked closer. They could see it more clearly now, but it seemed to be getting darker. Somehow, the alien was reflecting light away from the area, or absorbing it, or doing _something_ which blocked out the light from the sun. Soon the only three points of light visible in the alley were the sonic screwdriver and the Shuk's shining eyes.

Then, abruptly, there were only two point of light.

Rose swore, and there was the sound of metal hitting stone. Something had happened to the sonic screwdriver.

Desperately, Donna stared into the Shuk's eyes, knowing that her skill was now all they had to protect them. And her desperation must have forced her to interpret the Shuk's mind into concepts she could understand, because suddenly she could see some of its aims.

She gasped, reaching out for Rose and Freya, but they were out of her reach. The Shuk had come here on someone else's orders.

It had come here to kill.

* * *

From where she waited, outside the alley in the light, Melissa heard a single scream, and then silence.

And Lucy Cole watched as one of the figures on her scanner screen disappeared.

Fate had played out.


	20. Death

**Disclaimer:** see previous chapter.

**20: Death**

It was dark, so dark that she couldn't see a thing. The sonic screwdriver was dead, and she couldn't even see the creature's eyes in the blackness any more. _Has it gone? _she wondered, but why would it leave now? It had them just where it wanted -

Then something grabbed her from behind, and she couldn't suppress the scream that burst out of her.

_It was behind me,_ Rose realised, fighting to get free of the alien's grasp. She twisted and kicked, even tried biting it, but the blows that would have made any human attacker release her didn't have any effect on this creature. But of course, bipedal didn't guarantee _humanoid_. She ought to have known that.

In the struggle, she stepped on something - something small and metallic that crunched underfoot. _The sonic screwdriver!_ she realised, trying desperately to get a hand free to take hold of it -

But then her attacker let go of her, pushed her away from it, and she landed hard on the ground with her head striking against the wall of the alley, and abruptly she was free. She tried to reach down to where the screwdriver was, but all of a sudden she couldn't remember where it had been. There was a sharp pain in the back of her head, and when she managed to get a hand to it her fingers came away wet and sticky.

_Blood_, Rose realised, and that was her last conscious thought.

* * *

The light came back, blindingly bright after the unnatural darkness created by the Shuk. Freya squeezed her eyes shut against the glare and waited for her vision to return to her. Slowly, she began to make out figures through the brightness.

Donna, frantically rubbing her eyes to try and get her sight back, because her ability communicated itself to her through sight, and she was lost without it.

Melissa, running in from the mouth of the alley, demanding answers that they didn't have.

And her mother, lying on the ground where she had fallen, in a little pool of her own blood.

_No!_

Freya's thoughts flashed back to the events of a year and a half ago. She remembered how her mother had managed to get through to her on the phone, to tell her to pretend that she hadn't. How Freya had had to call her father and convince him that she hadn't heard from Rose. How she had sat there on the sitting room floor for hours, dialling a number that she knew wouldn't work, and screaming.

"_Mum! __**Mum!**__"_

She'd stayed there for a long time, screaming and sobbing and trying to call. And because the aliens had been telepathic, she'd repeated it over and over in her mind: _She isn't calling back. She isn't going to call. She's not coming back._

"_Mum! Mum! __**Mum!**__"_

She'd repeated it so many times to herself that she'd really started to believe it was true. And when her mother had contacted her again, she'd had to remind herself strongly that it was a lie, that Rose wasn't really dead.

Now, she had to do the opposite. To try and convince herself that her mum was alive, despite the evidence of her eyes.

_She's not dead,_ Freya thought frantically. _She's not dead. She's not dead she's not dead she's not dead - well, she is but she isn't because she's going to come back because she's indestructible, she always said that - no, she always __**says**__, present tense, because she'll keep on saying it, she'll come back and it'll all be normal again, she's not dead, she's not -_

_But she is -_

_But she can't be -_

_Please don't let her be -_

_But what if she is?_

_Maybe she's not coming back._

_Maybe she's dead._

_Mum? Mum?_

_**Mum!!!**_

* * *

There was nothing. Just darkness. The darkness and the silence.

She drifted through the nothingness.

This place was nothing.

And she was nothing, too.

She didn't know how long she spent there. In this place, in this _emptiness_, time meant little. Perhaps there was no time. Perhaps the time had stopped along with everything else.

She had no body. Nothing to hold her down, to constrain her into one form. Her consciousness floated alone in the void.

She didn't know who she was. Her sense of identity had been left behind with her body. All she knew was the darkness, the silence. The emptiness.

And then it was no longer silent. Suddenly, or it might have been slowly, for this place was timeless, a song began. An eerie and somehow familiar song. A link to who she had been before she was here.

The song increased, quickly or slowly, she couldn't tell. And then there was a spark in the blackness. A single spark of golden light.

The spark grew, shifted, increased, until the gold was all she could see, filling almost all her vision.

A vision that showed her all dimensions, everywhere at once, not confined to any one point at one time.

But then it _wasn't_ like that, and her spirit was compressed, forced back into a body. A heavy, earthy body that compressed her, tied down the infinite dimensions she had known in the void into one point, one shape.

A complex shape, all bones and muscles and hundreds of parts; how would she ever control it?

The sensation of suffocating, of _needing_ something to survive, of not knowing what it was…

And then the memories of her time in this body rushed back to her, and she took a deep breath and felt the air rush in to her oxygen-starved lungs…

And then she was herself again, and this body was _hers_ and moving in it was natural…

And then Rose Smith opened her eyes.

_Welcome back to the land of the living,_ she thought dryly.


	21. NonInterference

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**21: Non-Interference**

"I'm fine," said Rose for Melissa's benefit. "I just got knocked out, that's all."

She was quite good at this by now: making up excuses as to why she wasn't dead. "Knocked out" was always useful for a fall, and "fainted" worked for blood loss.

"But - the _blood_?" persisted Melissa.

Rose put a hand to her head. The cut had closed up by the time she returned to life, but her hair was still soaked in blood.

"Head wounds always bleed a lot," she offered vaguely. "It's nothing, really. It's already closed up."

Melissa nodded, seemingly convinced. After all, Rose was evidently alive and unhurt. What other explanation could there be?

"I thought you'd _died_!" choked Donna. Freya shook off her shock and ran to her mother, holding on to her tightly, blinking back tears.

"Indestructible, remember?" said Rose soothingly, casting a glance in Melissa's direction. She wished that she and her children were alone and could talk freely. It would be considerably harder to reassure them if they all had to be careful of what they said.

"I know," said Donna shakily. "I _know_. But it doesn't help, knowing that. Not when… not when I can _see_ that you're -" She broke off, not wanting to say it.

Rose understood now. Donna's abilities had shown her irrevocable proof that Rose really was dead. Rose had always glossed over what happened when she died, even in her thoughts. She and John said that Rose "couldn't die" - but she did. She came back every time, but she still died.

And it still hurt.

She pushed that thought away before Donna could see it, hoping desperately for some sort of distraction…

"Ok, ok," said Melissa, sounding exasperated. "You thought she was dead. She isn't. Now that we've got that cleared up, can we _please_ drop the subject?"

Freya snapped.

"Drop it? _Drop it?_" The tears flowed unchecked down her face, but Freya was too angry to care. "She was _dead_ - she's my _mum_ - I thought - _and you want me to __**drop**__ it?_" She pulled free of her mother's arms and rounded on Melissa, looking furious. "_How would you feel if it was __**your**__ mum?_" she demanded.

Melissa considered that. "Well, of course I'd be sad if she died," she said, as if it were obvious. "I'd be sad if I saw _anyone_ die. But she isn't dead, so…"

"Oh."

Donna's exclamation was so quiet, she hadn't expected anyone to hear her - but Freya did, and turned to look at her. Forcing herself to calm down, she asked a silent question of her older sister. _What?_

Donna looked over the top of Freya's head, straight into Melissa's eyes, and found confirmation there of what she had already assumed. "Your parents…" she breathed. "Don't they _care_ about you?"

"Of course they do!" Melissa insisted. "They give me everything I want! Can _you_ say the same?"

"But -" Donna began, but Rose stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

"The Coles can raise their daughter however they want," she said, sounding tired. "It's not our place to interfere."

* * *

Melissa couldn't face seeing her parents after that. She made sure to take the back stairs through the house, avoiding the main rooms and her parents' suite. Her mind was full of doubts.

_They give me everything I want,_ Melissa told herself, over and over again. _Of course they care for me._

But they'd never looked at her the way Mrs Smith looked at Donna.

Melissa sighed, threw something at the wall half-heartedly (whatever it was, it could be replaced) and went to see her aunt.

After spilling out all the events in the alley to her, Melissa asked the all-important question: "Do you think Mother and Father _really_ care about me?"

"I think you should make up your own mind about that, dear," Lucy answered. "But remember that I'm always here for you."

Melissa nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

"You said Mrs Smith wasn't hurt?" Lucy asked, after they had sat in silence together for a while.

"She got knocked out," Melissa replied unsurely. "There was a lot of blood, but - it wasn't serious."

"I'm glad of that," said Lucy sweetly. "Think how her children would have felt if she'd been killed!"

* * *

_How did she survive?_ Lucy wondered. It was late at night, but she couldn't sleep. No dreams were coming to her that might solve the problem. She found a fresh canvas and painted the question onto it, in swirls of blood red and pitch black. _How did she survive?_

Lucy had seen Rose Smith's image on the scanner flicker and vanish. That meant death, and the scanner couldn't be fooled. She trusted it almost as much as her visions.

So why had the image reappeared a few minutes later, fully active again? How could that be possible? Who _was_ Rose Smith?

_It's not our place to interfere,_ she had said. Was it coincidence, or had Rose known that Lucy was watching? Did she know what Lucy was doing?

Well, if she did, she had misunderstood Lucy Cole. Interfering in Fate was a mistake, but Lucy knew that, and no amount of warning would frighten her out of it. She was doing what she was meant to do, playing her part in destiny.

And it wasn't interfering if she was only doing what was meant to happen. She was fulfilling Fate, not changing it.

But if Rose Smith had come back to life, then _she_ had changed Fate, and that made her Lucy's greatest enemy.

* * *

_It's not our place to interfere._

That was what her mother had said. Powerful words. Words that carried a sense of mystery. As if she had heard them said before.

As Freya Smith drifted off to sleep, she heard her father's voice echoing in her ears from long ago.

"_They used to call it the Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the continent of Wild Endeavour, in the mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords… the oldest and most mighty race in the universe, looking down on the galaxies below, sworn never to interfere - only to watch."_


	22. If Only

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**22: If Only**

"This could be it," said Harold, when Donna told him what had happened in the alley.

"Could be _what_?" asked Freya grumpily. She'd been snappish all day; she hadn't slept properly the night before, she said. Of course, that was understandable considering the things she had seen yesterday. Donna remembered vividly the sheer panic in her sister's mind while their mother lay dead.

To dispel the memories Donna looked at Harold's face, intending to answer Freya's question for him. "It could be what Gwen warned us about?" Donna voiced her brother's thoughts incredulously.

Harold shrugged rebelliously. _Why not?_ said his thoughts.

"Harold, that was a year and a half ago." Donna sounded exasperated.

"_Soon_ doesn't mean much to Seers," Harold pointed out. "They don't have much concept of time passing. They see the future as the same as the present. That's what Dad said."

"He said a lot about Seers, didn't he," Donna agreed. Her tone turned sharp. "And I also remember him mentioning _possible futures_. Did you think of _that_?"

"It still _could_ be true," Harold insisted. "Just because we don't know for sure, that doesn't mean we should ignore it."

"I think you're overreacting," said Donna firmly. "How would you feel about the attack if you hadn't heard Gwen? Shocked, right, but you wouldn't think there was any more to come. Isolated incident. We move past it."

"And if there _was_ more to come, then we'd all be in danger." Harold wasn't backing down. "We can't just ignore a warning like that! And never mind possible futures - most Seers see the most likely possibility. It could still happen!"

"The most likely possibility a year and a half ago?" Donna shook her head. "If nothing's changed in eighteen months, then there's something seriously wrong with the future."

"It still could -"

"Harry, we're never going to know for certain with something this vague. And being obsessed with it just makes us suspicious of everyone."

Unspoken, behind her words, the terrible theory of the year before hung in the air between them.

_It just makes us suspicious of everyone._

_Suspicious enough to accuse our sister._

_It's not Freya. It's __**not**__ Freya._

"What do you think, Freya," Harold asked, trying to distract himself from his thoughts about her. Also, he was aware that his argument with Donna had rather left her out of the conversation.

Freya looked tired. There were dark shadows underneath her eyes from her sleepless night. "I think…" she began, and stopped, unsure how to put her feelings into words. "I think the future isn't set in stone," she said finally.

There was something more in her thoughts, though. Something that Donna wouldn't have even noticed normally, because it was so similar to the meaning of her words. Just an alternative interpretation of the same theme, but one filled with new significance.

_I think… we always have a choice._

* * *

But whether or not anyone believed the two events were connected, the day after a Shuk attacked Rose Smith in an alley a Weevil appeared in the Torchwood Gamma base. No one connected the two things, because one was Alpha's job and one was Gamma's, and Suzie Costello didn't talk to Yvonne Hartman unless she had to. The main reason they disliked each other, according to John, was their similarities, although Harold personally didn't think that made any sense.

But all the same, because Suzie didn't tell Rose or John, none of the family knew about it. Perhaps they would have re-evaluated their opinions, had they known. Perhaps they would not have.

Torchwood Gamma put the appearance down to Rift activity. After all, objects and people came through the Rift from all times and into all places in Cardiff. Why not their base? In fact, it was probably a miracle that it hadn't happened before. And at least it had been easier to capture and contain the alien once it had appeared.

Maybe, if they had known what Donna knew, they would have been more suspicious. The Shuk had, after all, come through the Rift, and been taken to London with the intention of murder. Did that suggest something about the Rift? Something that they ought to have noticed, but never had?

Except, of course, that Torchwood Gamma knew nothing about the Shuk, not even the official report, and certainly not the ideas of a young girl who ought not to have known anything about it. Likewise, Rose and John knew nothing about the latest Weevil appearance, and therefore neither did Donna.

The pieces were all there to see.

If only someone had been able to put them together.

* * *

Lucy knew the answer now.

It had come to her after many sleepless nights - sleepless because her dreams showed only the future, and could never explain the past. Dreaming couldn't solve every problem, so she had remained awake, painting, thinking. And finally, she knew the answer.

She knew why she had failed to kill Rose Smith.

She had been looking over some of her old paintings at the time, and she had found one from almost two years ago - the image from the dream which had first warned her to beware of the Smiths. A family group. A happy family, outwardly, although one with too many secrets in their eyes.

Rose and John. Donna, Harold and Freya.

Three children, ages thirteen, twelve and eight respectively.

They weren't that old yet. Oh, the boy might perhaps have been twelve, but she knew for a fact that the oldest girl was not yet a teenager. Her birthday was in July. She had invited Melissa to her party last year.

And Lucy couldn't act before then, because that would be pre-empting the future, and that was forbidden. The whole family had to be alive on the day her painting showed, because she had dreamed it.

She had Seen it.

And so Fate had allowed Rose Smith to live, although she should have been dead.

Lucy had made a mistake, something she never normally did. She had believed herself infallible. But she had acted before her dreams had told her to. She had allowed Rose Smith to cheat Fate once. Was it possible that she could do so again?

_If only…_ she painted onto her canvas, in turquoise for dreams. The canvas had originally borne her question: _How did she survive?_ But now she knew the answer, so she had painted over it.

Layers within layers.

_If only…_

If only she had not struck too soon.


	23. Not Long Now

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**23: Not Long Now**

_27__th__ July_

_Donna's birthday. Her 13__th__. She said she was celebrating finally being officially older than me - I've been 12 since May._

_She had a huge disco, and I mean __**huge**__. Everyone in her year, and some people from others. It had to be held in the Tyler mansion - there just wasn't room in our house. Melissa looked impressed. I wonder if it's bigger than hers? Maybe I should ask Donna what she really thought._

_Donna must have danced with every boy in the place, but discos aren't exactly my thing. They aren't Yasmin's either, so we stood in a corner and talked. About science. Donna kept looking at us like we were insane, so we did end up dancing as well. Just one dance, nothing special. And it definitely didn't mean anything!_

_Melissa asked me to dance as well. I turned her down._

_And that definitely __**did**__ mean something. I can't stand Melissa._

_Freya doesn't like her either. She never says anything, but I can tell. I think I know her better than Donna does - Donna doesn't like reading her little sister's mind._

_Freya got to leave early. She's not old enough to stay up to the end. Lucky devil._

_Not that I believe in the Devil, whatever Mum and Dad say about Krop Tor…_

_Now I'm just rambling._

_Nothing more to report._

Harold sat back in his chair and regarded the file. It was password-protected, of course, like all his other private files. Besides, he didn't want anyone to know that he kept a diary. But the protections were nothing special. Any hacker could have found it.

But there wasn't anything to find. It was just a file of waffling - he never deleted anything on it, no matter how random his musings became. There was nothing important on it.

Nothing unusual.

Harold took a deep breath, put his fingers to the keyboard and typed furiously: _nodaleksnotimelords183497666_.

The computer screen flashed up a request for PASSWORD to which he entered _64771Fr3y_.

A second file bloomed across the screen to take the place of the first. This was the real diary: the absolute truth, and far more secure than the decoy it was reached through. This was Harold's record of alien sightings… or the lack of them. He had kept it since he had heard Gwen's warning, and kept it a deadly secret.

_27/07_

_Donna 13. Supposed to be unlucky, if you believe in that stuff._

_No alien sightings. Nothing to report from party. Yasmin still looking out for unusual things but hasn't seen any. Don't think she'd tell Donna if she had any more: not worried (although we never told her why she had to look)._

_Got a strange feeling about Donna's 13__th__. Don't know why. Don't understand it. Don't believe in superstition. If Donna can read minds maybe fortune-telling can be real, but I can't do it. Definitely._

_Or it could be something I realised subconsciously but not consciously. That's a more rational explanation._

_If some people think 13's unlucky could they be waiting to attack Donna till she's 13?_

_Strange theory, probably stupid. Don't believe it._

_But if it's true then at least Freya has 5 more years to figure out who's doing it._

* * *

"How was the party, dear?" asked Lucy Cole.

Melissa shrugged.

"I asked you a question," Lucy reminded her gently.

"It was alright," replied Melissa. "Good, actually. They had it in the Tyler mansion. I _met Peter Tyler_! But Donna's brother wouldn't dance with me… can't see why."

"Donna's brother? Do you like him, then?"

"No, he's just an annoyance, but a guest has to be respectful to her hosts. But he turned me down, so it's obvious no one taught _him_ any manners!"

"How old is he?" asked Lucy casually.

"Twelve, why?"

"Well, you don't expect a twelve-year-old boy to be well-mannered, do you?" Lucy winked at her niece. "Take my advice, Melissa, and don't expect too much of boys - of any age. They're all idiots!"

_Twelve, _she thought gleefully. _The boy twelve, and the oldest girl thirteen…_

"I don't know how Donna puts up with a brother," she continued. "Mind you, she is older than him. There's a little sister too, isn't there?"

"Freya," Melissa confirmed. "She's seven, I think."

"_Seven?_ I don't know how she copes!"

_Seven! Thirteen, twelve and seven…_

So close! So very nearly there…

Could she act now? In the grand scheme of things, did the youngest sister really matter?

But she couldn't strike too soon. She knew that now. She had to wait.

Thirteen, twelve and seven…

Not long now.

* * *

_Not long now!_ The phrase rippled through Lucy's dreams. 13, 12, 8. 12 8 13 8 13 12… Not much longer to wait.

Very soon, she would be able to destroy her enemies without interfering with Fate.

Lucy rolled over in bed, a cheerful smile on her sleeping face. Her dreams were full of golden light.

And in Cardiff, the Rift flickered… pulsed… _shifted_…

A flash of golden light.

Weevils in the centre of Cardiff.

Lucy dreamed the destruction and smiled, because she knew it was happening, as she always knew it was going to.

Not long now.


	24. The Rift

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**24: The Rift**

Two months later, Suzie Costello was seriously regretting having called for John Smith's advice. He and his wife simply couldn't keep their noses out of anything - which was useful when signs of possible alien infiltration came up, but not so good when they started to ask questions about the higher level of Rift activity in recent months. Suzie and her team were coping perfectly well, thank you very much, so Rose Smith could go and give her so-called "helpful advice" to someone who was actually _interested_! How did _she_ know what the Rift was doing anyway? Was her husband hacking their computers? Suzie wouldn't put it past him…

But a few days ago, she had swallowed her pride and asked him for help. Hacker or not, John Smith knew more about space and time in general, and the Rift in particular, than anyone else Suzie knew.

Unfortunately, when it came to dragging him down to Wales for a week, John Smith came as a package deal. A very annoying package deal.

There was John, wearing glasses that he didn't need and talking to himself at ninety miles an hour; Rose, looking ridiculously young, calling in Epsilon at the first sign of trouble; Donna, always in everyone's way and never _once_ shutting up; Harold, messing up the archives and reprogramming the computers to do all _sorts_ of stupid things. And the youngest child, whatever her name was, so plain and dull that Suzie sometimes doubted she belonged in the family at all. The Smith family - an instant headache!

"Mum! Dad! Look what I found!" Harold was running up the stairs from the archives, an unidentified piece of alien tech in his hands, excitement making him sound much more childish. Suzie rolled her eyes. _Oh, here we go…_

The same almost boyish excitement crossed John Smith's face. "Is that what I think it is?"

"That depends…" mused Rose. "If you think it's a tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator, then it is. Otherwise…"

"What did you call it?" demanded Suzie, trying not to seem too eager. She didn't understand what half of the things in the archives did. Perhaps this could be her chance to get them properly classified - and this one in particular interested her, because her medic, Owen, had suggested it was an alien surfboard, and she'd bet him a fiver that it wasn't.

"Oh, but you _must_ know what it is!" said Donna, with a sweet little smile. "After all, it's _yours_! And I bet it's been there for _ages_, so you must have had a chance to find out!"

"It's a surfboard, isn't it?" suggested Owen. Suzie wondered how long he'd been listening instead of working. But that didn't matter, since he was about to be spectacularly humiliated -

"A _pan-dimensional_ surfboard," both Rose and John corrected him at once.

Owen smirked triumphantly at Suzie. Gwen and Toshiko looked up from their desks, waiting for her to admit she was wrong. Donna Smith was smiling smugly, almost as if she had known about the bet all along, although that wasn't possible.

Suzie had never been more grateful for the sudden spike in Rift activity which distracted everyone.

* * *

"Gwen had a theory," Suzie admitted hesitantly, "about the Rift…"

"If I were you, I'd trust Gwen's theories," said John, and as usual his words were overlaid with another meaning which entirely escaped Suzie. "Especially about the Rift."

"There have been more Rift alerts recently," Suzie began, "and also more disappearances. More unexplained Missing Persons. And Gwen thought… well, what if the Rift doesn't just bring things here? What if it _takes_ things - and people - too?"

John Smith stared at her as if she were mad. "Well, of course it takes things! What did you expect?"

Suzie glared.

Rose elbowed her husband in the ribs.

John started waving his hands about and explaining. "Think of it as… a sort of _door_. It isn't, of course, but that's the easiest way to visualise it. Now, one side of the doorway is - more or less - fixed _here_, in Cardiff. The water tower, to be precise. The other side can be anywhere and anywhen. When stuff comes through the Rift and ends up _here_, it's been picked up from anywhere in time and space. But if it's a door… well, it'd be a pretty rubbish sort of door if you could only get through it in one direction. Of course it takes things! Picks them up from Cardiff and dumps them somewhere else. And it took you _how long_ to figure it out?"

"We haven't got time for that now," said Rose hastily. "You said more unexplained disappearances. Is that why you called us?"

"It's not just Cardiff." Suzie was eager to get the conversation back on track. "It's further afield than that, all the way to the Brecon Beacons, although most of the people have gone missing from the city itself. We think the Rift might be spreading -"

"And you're only telling us this _now_?" John was wide-eyed, almost panicking - and it took a lot to scare _him_. "You let us sit here playing with an extrapolator while the Rift is spreading?"

"Is that… bad?" Somehow, Suzie suspected her words were an understatement.

John stared at her. "If the Rift's spreading, it can bring more stuff through from other places - and take more things as well. Imagine what could happen if the Black Death turned up - or a Sontaran battleship! And it isn't going to stop spreading any time soon. The whole world's at risk. Eventually, the whole _universe_! The amount of damage the Medusa Cascade did…"

"Is that why it's all gas clouds?" asked Donna, the only other person who actually knew what he was talking about. John didn't like to discuss his childhood, but Donna had read it from his mind.

"But anyway," Suzie interrupted, "we don't know for sure that it _is_ spreading. We don't know much about the disappearances in the Brecon Beacons, but there haven't been any alien artefacts showing up. For all we know, it isn't the Rift at all."

"So in other words," Rose cut in, finally in her element after all John's technical explanations, "you want us to go and look round, and find out what's going on there."

Suzie nodded. "I don't know how to tell if it's the Rift or not," she admitted. "That's why I called for you - well, for John, really. I didn't expect the rest of you, but I think it could work out."

* * *

And that was how the Smith family ended up going camping.

"Camping," said Donna disgustedly. "In the Brecon Beacons. In _September_."

"Better than school," shrugged Freya.

"But - _camping_?" Donna imitated Melissa's upper-class accent. "So, what did you do on your top-secret Torchwood business holiday from school?" She switched to her own voice, heavy with sarcasm. "Oh, I went camping in Wales. What did you think I was doing?"

"Donna!" Harold tried to disguise his annoyance - and failed. "Shut up and help put the tent up, will you?"

"She's right about one thing, though," Rose admitted, from where she was unloading the sleeping bags they had borrowed from the similarly-borrowed van. "I certainly never expected to end up doing this!"


	25. In Dreams

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**A/N: **I originally wrote this chapter as a writing exercise: to work out what my characters' fears and hopes were likely to be. It proved to include a certain amount of foreshadowing, and a rather vital plot point. Therefore, I decided to post it, which is why I am currently uploading two chapters at once.

**25: In Dreams**

That night, John dreamed of hundreds of new worlds, and of worlds he had known in his old universe but that were slightly different in this one, and of other times that were also the same but different. He dreamt of travelling between them with Rose, who had endured three thousand years and come back for him. He dreamt of saving planets, rescuing civilisations, defeating creatures and doing an awful lot of running, always with Rose at his side.

But when he woke up, he found that he had forgotten all the details. He knew the general gist, but nothing more, and even that little was fading.

But one fragment of conversation lingered in his mind for longer.

"_Um… I think I just shorted out the chameleon circuit."_

"_Meaning we're going to be travelling through all of space and time in a _tent_?"_

"_Pretty much, yeah."_

* * *

Rose dreamed she was standing in front of the TARDIS, which was parked in its old place in front of the block of flats in the Powell Estate. She turned slowly to examine the rest of the area. It was exactly the same as it had been last time she'd been back there in her old universe.

A girl of around eight was making for the TARDIS unerringly. Worried, Rose moved so as to block the door. She didn't know this girl, and she clearly knew about the TARDIS.

But when Rose looked into the girl's eyes, she realised that this was Freya. And Rose hadn't recognised her own daughter! Freya nodded to her, unlocked the door and went in. Curiously, Rose followed her.

The TARDIS looked just the same as it always had, too. It was empty except for herself and Freya - and as her daughter turned Rose saw that her eyes were shining with silver light.

Rose stumbled back in shock, and then she realised that there was someone behind her. Hoping to see the Doctor, she turned around, but was met with the shimmering gold image of the Bad Wolf, as John had once drawn it for her. Her own face, but not her face, and wreathed in golden light…

The light was too bright; she turned away again. But then she was greeted with another face - Freya's face, wreathed in silver, looking almost like another Bad Wolf, although younger, perhaps less powerful.

"_I am the Wolf-daughter,_" she said, and again, her voice was Freya's, but slightly different. "_I create myself._"

And then they were both gone, and so was the TARDIS, and everything was black.

* * *

Donna dreamed she was standing in the pit at the centre of Krop Tor, as she had seen it in her father's memory. On either side of her were the urns on the pillars that she knew she had to smash - except that she found herself unable to move in any direction.

She was transfixed by fear. Rooted to the spot, unable even to look away. All she could do was stare at It.

Satan.

Lucifer.

Abaddon.

The Beast.

It roared in her face, straining at its chains, and Donna could not move.

Abruptly, her father was standing between herself and the Beast, wearing brown pinstripes.

"I'm sorry," he said, his expression unfathomable. "I'm so, so sorry."

Metal cuffs encircled Donna's wrists. Slowly, chains grew out of them, connecting to the pillars on either side of her.

Trapping her.

"Dad!" she cried, but her father was gone. In his place was a man she knew from her mother's memories: blue eyes, big ears, a battered leather jacket.

"Everything has its time," he said cruelly, and faded from view, leaving Donna alone with the Beast.

But then there was a gunshot, and the Beast flickered and vanished. Replacing it stood her mother, Rose Smith, wearing Lucy Saxon's blood-red dress and wielding the huge gun she'd had when she jumped universes to save everyone from the Daleks.

"I am the Bad Wolf," said Rose, and then she smiled cruelly.

"Do you like my gun?" she asked, and fired.

* * *

Harold dreamed that he was watching a concert, and that his sister Freya was on the stage and about to sing. And when she began, he knew without question that the song she was singing was the most beautiful he had ever heard.

But he couldn't hear it.

He tried running forward, to get closer to her. But as fast as he ran, the stage with Freya on it slid backwards even faster.

Then he realised that it wasn't Freya sliding away, it was him, because he was floating in space on a tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator, and Captain Jack Harkness was hovering next to him on another one.

"Freya's going to die soon," Jack said casually.

"No!" Harold protested, horrified. "You're wrong!"

Jack scowled. "Isn't that… prejudice?" he demanded, and pushed Harold off the surfboard. He fell down… down… down…

And then he landed, quite gently, on top of Yasmin Milligan, and she kissed him soundly.

And he kissed her back.

* * *

Freya dreamed of golden light.

She dreamed of darkness.

She dreamed of silence.

She dreamed of song.

She twisted and turned in her sleep, murmuring fragments of lyrics that even she didn't understand.

And when she woke up, she knew what she had to do.

* * *

And Lucy Cole dreamed that the danger from the Smith family was greater than ever.

Almost before she knew it, she was in her brother's car, speeding down the motorway, following her instincts.

The time of waiting was over. Now, she had to stop them, before they ruined everything she had built.

She had to act now.


	26. Fated Meeting

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**26: Fated Meeting**

Freya awoke very suddenly, and lay there in the dark of the tent until she was sure that no one else was awake. She groped around beside her sleeping bag for her glasses and watch. The time was four in the morning.

She dressed as quietly as she could: green T-shirt, black trousers. She nearly put on her brother's trainers instead of her own, fumbling around in the dark and trying not to wake her family.

She was unused to being awake so early. There was an eerie stillness in the air, and the sky outside was greyish. Feeling as if she were in a dream, she folded her pyjamas and left them on top of her sleeping bag.

Outside, the air was crisp and cold. There was mist in the air and dew on the grass. The sun had not yet risen, but grey light illuminated the field.

Freya's surreal feeling increased. _Everything_ was silent. She had almost never heard complete silence before. In London there was always some noise, somewhere.

Freya liked silence.

She set off through the still, grey air. Her trainers left clear footprints behind in the dew.

She was going back to Cardiff.

* * *

There was a small girl walking down the road, in the opposite direction to the way Lucy was going. Lucy drove past her without a second glance, because the girl was so thoroughly _ordinary_.

But once she had rounded the corner, she skidded to a halt. Every instinct in her body was suddenly screaming that she had missed something important. The girl?

Cautiously, Lucy got out of the car and walked back to where she could get a good view of this mysterious girl. She was rather young to be out on her own, she supposed, but she didn't think she was anyone important. Of course, Lucy could only see her from the back, but what she remembered of her face was equally unassuming. She had mousy hair, cut in a bob, and she was wearing dull-coloured clothes. Nothing special.

But something about her T-shirt was familiar. Lucy remembered it now. That particular shade of dark grey-green…

It wasn't a colour that she needed, normally. She'd had to mix it especially. And it had taken her so _long_ to find a match for the shade she had seen in the dream.

The dream about the Smith family.

Eight-year-old Freya, standing between her brother and sister, with their parents behind them. Drab-clothed and bespectacled, looking completely unimportant - _but she had been in the centre of the picture._

A lot of things abruptly made sense.

She had known, of course, that Melissa had been planning a day in London with some of the Smiths. Her dreams had warned her that her enemy would be there. She had found the scanner, and the Shuk, and prepared to strike, even though the dream had not told her to.

And she had struck at the wrong person. It had never been Rose. It was always Freya.

Presumably, it was because of that mistake that Rose had been allowed to return to Life. It was not her time to die. Not yet.

Of course, if she tried to protect her daughter, that might change…

* * *

A black car pulled up beside Freya and stopped. There was a blonde woman driving it. She leaned out of the window and remarked, "You're rather young to be out on your own, aren't you?"

"Not really," answered Freya casually.

"Where are you going? Can I give you a lift?"

"Cardiff," Freya answered dreamily. "I have to get to Cardiff."

And she got in the car.

She felt as if everything she had done this morning was just another dream. It didn't surprise her at all that a woman offering her a lift had appeared just as she was starting to get tired. The woman would take her to Cardiff and then everything would be alright. She was sure of it.

"How old are you?" asked the woman, after they had gone some way.

Freya's dreamlike feeling increased. Without even thinking about it, she opened her mouth and answered, "Eight."

She didn't know why she'd said it. She wasn't even sure if it was true. But she didn't normally blurt her age out to complete strangers. They always looked at her as if to say, _Then, where are your parents?_ even when her parents were right next to her. Or did they? She didn't know. But somehow she had the impression that people always did.

This woman wasn't looking at her like that, though. She was concentrating on her driving. What Freya could see of her face was calculating, not pitying.

These thoughts occupied her all the way to Cardiff. If the woman spoke again, Freya didn't hear her.

* * *

Lucy looked at the girl in the car with her and sighed.

In the beginning, playing mother to Melissa had been just another thing that she had to do, another opportunity placed in her path by her visions: a chance to learn more about the movements of her enemies. But it wasn't - not any more. It was about encouraging her niece to see the values of honesty and kindness.

And it was about her having someone to care for.

But there were so many things that she couldn't tell Melissa: things to do with the Sight, which Melissa didn't have and couldn't understand. If Melissa knew the truth, she would fear Lucy - the same way her brother, Melissa's father, did by instinct, because he knew she was _different_ somehow.

And last night, she had come very close to telling Melissa the truth, because she couldn't bear lying to her all the time. Lucy had always tried to be honest. Even her visions were the utmost truth.

And she had nearly told Melissa too much of the truth - which meant that she had to distance herself from her now, before she said too much altogether.

If she couldn't have Melissa as a daughter, could she find someone else to care for?

Someone talented enough to See the truths she did; someone clever enough to understand why she did these things; someone young enough to accept her for what she was and not recoil from her in fear.

Lucy looked again at Freya Smith, sitting beside her in the car, lost in a waking dream.

And very slowly, she smiled.


	27. The Bond Between Siblings

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**27: The Bond Between Siblings**

Harold stirred lazily, rolled over and opened his eyes.

Donna sat up sharply, stifling a scream.

Both woke at the exact same moment, and their eyes met in surprise as they realised that fact.

"Well, that's weird," mouthed Donna silently.

_Serendipity,_ Harold thought, knowing that she would see it, and trying to impress her with the word. However, since Donna could also see in his mind that _serendipity _meant _happy coincidence_, she rather failed to be impressed by it. Baffling people with fancy words was no fun if the people involved knew exactly what the words meant.

"No one else is up," Donna mouthed next.

Harold checked his watch: quarter to six. Or 05.47 to be precise, which Harold was. Harold liked early mornings.

Their mother didn't.

Donna saw her own idea written across Harold's face and grinned. Her thoughts were hardly ever in harmony with her brother's. On this rare occasion, when they both had the same idea, she felt they ought to act on it.

She raised three fingers, then two, then one…

"PILLOW FIGHT!" both siblings screamed simultaneously, snatching up pillows from on top of their sleeping bags. Donna's pillow was batted away and lost almost instantly, so she threw her sleeping bag as well. It draped itself over Harold's head; he staggered backwards and tripped over his father's legs, hurling his pillow at his sister as he went down. Donna jumped on top of him, laughing uncontrollably as she bludgeoned him with his own pillow, since she couldn't find hers.

"What the…" asked John sleepily, wondering whether this was an alien invasion or a tent collapse.

One of Harold's flailing hands caught hold of John's pillow, dragged it out from under his head and tossed it directly into Rose's face as she sat up.

"Serendipity!" shrieked Donna, and burst into renewed laughter.

This, she decided, was the perfect start to a day. She had almost forgotten about her nightmare. The fears of the night had been eclipsed, swallowed up by the joys of the day. Even the annoyed look on her mother's face was fair and expected, not the cold anger of the dream-Rose.

The game had gone on long enough now, though. Donna nodded apologetically to her mother and got up, handing Harold back his pillow. She dumped her sleeping bag back where it was supposed to go and looked around for her pillow.

It had landed on top of Freya's sleeping bag.

Freya's _empty_ sleeping bag.

Her pyjamas were lying on top of it, neatly folded. Her clothes were no longer in the pile she had left them in last night.

And Freya wasn't there.

That one moment of realisation seemed to last an eternity.

Freya was gone.

Gone willingly, too – why else would her pyjamas be there, so neatly folded? No, she'd had time to consider her actions. She'd got dressed and prepared herself to go – where?

Why would Freya have gone anywhere on her own? And in the early morning, too; she hated getting up early. Had she planned this, to wake herself up and leave before everyone else was awake?

Why had she left at all?

Surely if Freya had wanted to do something, to go somewhere else, she could have asked. They would have left her to do whatever it was in private, and without prying. Donna wouldn't even have looked at her face, if she had only asked.

And that was another thing. She didn't think Freya _had_ planned to do this. Certainly she had seen nothing in her thoughts to indicate it.

So what did that mean?

Donna forced herself to think rationally. Freya had woken up early - or earlier than was usual for her, at any rate. She had got dressed slowly and calmly, since she had had time to fold her pyjamas. No one had been hurrying her. She couldn't have been desperate to do whatever she had left to do, either.

So why had she left?

Donna frowned in confusion. _Ok, so trying to think rationally isn't helping. What does that mean? That _Freya_ wasn't thinking rationally when she left?_

_Then why did she leave?_

_Did she just wake up early and decide she couldn't get back to sleep, so she went outside? That sounds like a sensible explanation._

_Except, of course, that it doesn't explain why she hasn't come back._

And that was when her phone rang.

Donna swore under her breath, and then glanced around hastily to make sure her mother hadn't noticed. Her father had - he could lip-read, even if he hadn't actually heard her - but he was thinking worse things, directed towards anyone who had done something to Freya.

She checked the call display. "Melissa," she mouthed to her father, and tried to suppress her irritation. It wasn't Melissa's fault that she'd called at such a difficult time. She didn't know anything about it.

"Donna!" Melissa's voice sounded shaky, although she was trying to hide it. "Aunt Lucy's disappeared."

"Tell the police," suggested Donna. She wished this was a face-to-face conversation, instead of a phone call. There was obviously something else in this matter than a simple disappearance, and she could have known it instantly instead of having to wait for Melissa to tell her.

She forced herself to concentrate on that irritation, rather than her fear for Freya. She wasn't going to lose control of her emotions. Never again.

"I'm telling Torchwood, aren't I?" said Melissa, as if it was obvious.

"Torchwood doesn't handle disappearances," said Donna, bored. This was stupid. Melissa was distracting her from the real problem of Freya's disappearance - which Torchwood _were_ handling. They didn't have time for Melissa's aunt.

"But they're in Cardiff! You _said_!"

"And?"

And there it was: all the thoughts that had made her voice shake, everything Donna would have known instantly if she had been able to see Melissa's face, spilling out of her because of her worry and her fear.

"And there was an earthquake in Cardiff yesterday, and you _said_ there was one before that was alien stuff, and she was watching it on the news and said it had to happen someday, like she _knew _about it! And now she's gone, and I think she's in Cardiff, and I don't know why, it's just a _feeling_, and don't tell me it's stupid because everyone else has been and I _know_ it is but it's _**true**_!"

Donna took a deep breath. "Thanks, Melissa. We'll look into it."

She ended the call.

_Strange, really,_ she thought. _Today just keeps changing. First that nightmare, then having fun with Harry, then finding Freya gone, and now this._

_Fear, happiness, worry…_

She didn't know how she felt at the moment. Perhaps it was the effect of so much emotion in such a short time, but she felt almost nothing now.

There was just determination - to find Freya no matter what had happened. And an icy-cold anger which she saw mirrored on Harold's face, like the joy of earlier.

_Because no one messes with our little sister. __**No one.**_


	28. Family Values

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**28: Family Values**

"Lucy Cole?" asked Harold in disbelief.

"Lucy _Saxon_," their father corrected grimly. His face closed off, as it always did when he thought of that year that never was. There were some things he would never let Donna see.

He did allow her one image, though.

Lucy Saxon's calm, uncaring face.

As she shot her husband in cold blood.

What would she do to Freya?

"Lucy Cole." Rose's voice was firm, determined. "She's not Lucy Saxon, she's different. She must be, because this is a different world. She doesn't work in publishing, the Master doesn't exist - and we don't know how much those things have changed her. That means we can't rely on your impressions of her parallel self. Any one of them could be wrong, and we wouldn't know it. Look at Donna and Diana: they're _completely_ different."

"Right then," agreed John. "Lucy Cole." He glanced over at Rose. "Do we want backup?"

"No," said Rose decisively. "We can do it alone."

Donna nodded grimly. _This has nothing to do with Torchwood - not any more. Lucy Cole took Freya. Out of all the children in the world, she picked Freya._

_And _that_ makes it personal._

The car shot down the road. No one had said anything, but somehow they all knew where they were going.

Cardiff. It had to be. If Lucy Cole was doing something to the Rift, that was where she would be.

And she would have Freya with her.

Beside her, Harold was wondering why Lucy Cole had taken Freya in the first place. Donna didn't care about that. Lucy Cole was completely human, and when they found her Donna could read her mind and discover the truth. Until then, it didn't matter.

But she needed something else to focus on, to distract her until they got there. She sat in the car, breathing deeply and calmly, and tried to avoid looking at Freya's empty seat. And she watched the shifting flow of her brother's surface thoughts.

_Why Freya?_ Harold wondered. _What does Freya have that we don't?_

_I mean, I love my little sister more than anything else in the world, but - she's _normal_. Why her? Why her and not Donna? I could understand Donna being kidnapped - I mean, look at the Anax thing. But Freya?_

_Maybe it's a trap._

_Freya can't protect herself. She's more or less helpless. And we love her - and we panic when we find her missing. Is this a trap to get hold of the rest of us?_

_If so, we're playing right into Cole's hands - but Dad will have a plan. He always does._

_And _how_ did Cole get to Freya?_

_Ok, so Melissa knew about us going to Wales (I knew there was a reason I don't like Melissa), but not where, or why. If she's influencing the Rift, she might have guessed, especially since Melissa never stops babbling about Mum and Torchwood. But a campsite, in the Brecon Beacons, where there might not even _be_ any Rift activity? How did she find us?_

_And how did she get Freya?_

_She folded her pyjamas, for God's sake! No one was rushing her! She wasn't even trying to run away from something!_

_So what does that mean? She just got up, got dressed and wandered out of the campsite, without any reason for it, and then suddenly Lucy Cole found her on her own?_

_That is way too much of a coincidence._

_Or was it Fate?_

_What Gwen said…_

_**You have such powers!**_

_**But you'll need them.**_

_How dangerous _was_ Lucy? What did she want? Why the Rift - and _how_ was she controlling it?_

_**Beware of your friends…**_

_Melissa. It was obvious now, after the fact. But beforehand, they would never have guessed it. Not even she knew what she was doing._

…_**even of your family.**_

_**The changeling child…**_

_And Freya had apparently left the tent of her own free will…_

_No!_

Donna reached over and put her hand on her brother's arm.

"It's alright, Harry," she said softly. "It's not Freya. Remember? It can't be Freya. She's our sister."

Harold nodded shakily. Donna read fear in his eyes - fear that Freya might be hurt; fear that Freya might have betrayed them. There was a third fear too, one which she couldn't make out. Harold was hiding it even from himself.

But she couldn't decipher it, and to try she would have had to look fully into his mind. And she couldn't do that - not to her brother.

_This is what makes us family,_ she reflected. _We love each other, and trust each other, and we could never, _ever_ hurt each other._

_And _that_ is why it can't_ possibly_ be Freya who's doing this._

* * *

It felt as if she was being torn apart from the inside out.

She doubled over, gasping with the pain. She could have got used to almost anything else, over time. But not this. It seemed to get worse each time she felt it.

Dimly, through the haze of pain, she heard a voice. A _worried _voice. Why should anyone worry about her?

"Are you alright?" it asked desperately. "What's happening? Are you hurt?"

And then, something else, something so surprising that for one moment she forgot the pain in her confusion.

The voice asked, "What's that _noise_?"

But there was no noise, except the wounded-animal shrieks that she suspected came from her own mouth, and the voice surely knew that she was making those.

The pain cleared.

Lucy moved, sitting up, stretching muscles that had cramped in response to the pain she had felt. Freya Smith was standing next to her, hands clamped over her ears. When she met Lucy's eyes, she uncovered them cautiously, ready to block them again if necessary.

"You _heard_ it?" she asked, and the word _heard_ meant something different in her voice. It meant _experiencing_ another concept, one that was completely alien to the human mind, one that was translated differently to each person. For Lucy, it was pain, and always had been. For Freya, it seemed to be sound.

That was…interesting.

Freya nodded in response to her question. She seemed to have grasped that unspoken alternative meaning too. _Yes,_ thought Lucy. _I was right. The daughter I never had…_

"It has to happen," she said, referring still to the experience of a few moments ago. "You understand that, don't you?"

"For the future," the girl agreed. "Temporal continuity."

Lucy was impressed by that phrase. She didn't ask where Freya had heard it. She herself had never been quite sure where her knowledge came from.

Instead, she met Freya's eyes, and the understanding passed between them.

The Rift had just spread a little further. And this time, not only Lucy but Freya too had sensed it happen. It had widened Lucy's gift of Sight still further. This time, she had seen herself, ruling over all times at once, maintaining the timelines, keeping everything in its place.

And she had seen her daughter by her side, through all of Time.

"It's the Rift that grants the Sight," said Freya - not as a question, but as a statement.

And then she said, "I Saw my mother die."

Lucy put her arms around her, for she had shared that vision too. There had been a lot of blood, she remembered. "It's alright," she said softly, to her daughter. "I'll be your mother now."

"You'll be my family?"

And strange, sweet Freya Smith looked up at Lucy with absolute trust in her eyes and said: "There's something you should know about me, then."

She paused, snuggling into Lucy's embrace.

"I could never, _ever_ hurt my family."


	29. Temporal Powers

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**29: Temporal Powers**

Freya didn't understand.

Everything had taken on the same surreal quality as a dream. Or perhaps, it _was_ a dream; she wasn't sure. For all she knew, nothing since four o'clock in the morning had been real.

That would be a relief, although she didn't know whether this would count as a dream or a nightmare. It was just… confusing.

She wasn't… _herself_. She was different. She couldn't tell why or how, but she wasn't the same person who had fallen asleep in a sleeping bag beside Harold the night before. _Something_ had changed.

From what Lucy had said, she suspected it might be the Sight.

_If_ Lucy was real, and not part of her dream.

She wasn't sure anymore.

She didn't understand.

* * *

Lucy looked again at Freya. _My daughter_, she thought, again.

She still felt that thrill of joy whenever she looked at her.

Freya Smith.

_Should it be Freya Cole?_ Lucy mused. _Although I'm not sure I want to be a Cole. Not after the way my brother Alexander, the heir of the great Lord Cole of Tarminster, treats his little sister!_

That reminded her. _I haven't Seen __**dear Alex**__'s death yet._

She hoped it was fun. Messy, and at her own hands. And hopefully undignified enough to dishonour the Coles for trillions of years to come.

Of course, if she didn't See it, it couldn't happen. That was a shame, but it was the way things worked.

Now Freya was looking at her curiously. Lucy wondered how long she'd been staring at her daughter's face. Her daughter!

And naturally, Freya understood not to interrupt the though processes of a Seer. She was just waiting for answers, and didn't mind when they came.

Lucy decided that that sentence more or less summed up a Seer's life.

"Were you born in Cardiff?" she asked suddenly.

"No…" Freya was confused, she could tell.

So was Lucy. Not born in Cardiff? How could that work?

"Grew up here?" she suggested. "Visited while you were very young? Got any family here?"

Three shakes of the head. One for each question.

That made no sense.

"But then… how?" she breathed, more to herself than to Freya.

It was the Rift that gave her the gift of Sight. The power of Time, omniscient, omnipotent, had reached out from the Rift - and it had chosen _her_.

She had been so _young_, back then. Younger than Freya. Her parents had taken her back to Cardiff for the first time since she was born there, to visit her aunt. She still remembered: the boredom as the adults talked together; the annoyance as her brother dragged her into the garden to play; the relief as she found a hiding-place he didn't know about. A child's emotions. Unnecessary, mostly. Emotion should be felt in the understanding of what was to come. After that, the actual events were unimportant.

But one event had been important. The gentle touch on her mind, the sense of something else searching, exploring. And then, the acceptance. And after that, the sense of Time, Time in all its majesty, all its power.

The visions had been slight, at first. Small things: unimportant events, or brief snatches of the more significant ones. Not enough to show her how to live her life, not completely. Only guidance.

Still, she learnt never to ignore a vision. They were always true. _Always_.

Lucy Cole had been a strange child. She had drifted through life, always relaxed, with a dreamy look in her eyes even when she was concentrating hard. Accepting of problems, because life just _wasn't_ perfect.

Accepting even of the pain that came when the Rift shifted, when she felt Time ripple and the paths of the future twist.

_Epilepsy,_ they said, when she was twelve and the first screaming fit hit her. That had been minor, nothing like this was now. The Rift had settled after a few weeks. A few more fits and a mysterious earthquake in Cardiff later, nothing more was seen of her so-called epilepsy. The doctors were baffled, of course.

But all the same, her father had never treated her in the same way as her brother after that. He didn't want a crippled daughter. And her brother didn't want a sister who was _better_ than him, who could accept that she had an incurable disease and still live her life in the same way.

The visions had been a relief. She had lived in hope of the next one, because they were _certain_, absolute. They were true, they _had _to be. They made her feel as if she was in control.

The Rift shifted again in 2011, on a hot summer's day, at two minutes past eight in the morning. Only one fit, that time; even as she felt the agony of the Rift tearing itself open, she also knew that it would close, and sensed the relief that that would bring.

And it had brought more than relief.

Through the pain, the Rift had touched her mind directly, for the first time since she had received the Sight. It had brought with it vague, confusing impressions of another world, where the future had collided with and merged into the present.

And it had brought a greater gift of Sight.

That day, she had Seen herself for the first time. She had Seen her own actions and the consequences that came of them. She had truly Seen her own fate.

In theory, that was impossible.

But when dealing with the power of Time, anything could happen.

* * *

_You have such powers!_ Gwen had said, and at first Harold assumed she meant Donna. But she was talking to all of them, and about all of them. Donna thought it was his technological skills that Gwen had been referring to, but Harold hadn't been sure, even then.

_Is being clever a "power"? _he wondered. _I inherited Dad's brains, that's all. And only the human areas at that! No superhuman skills there, then._

Gwen had spoken in the present tense, but she had Seen all times as one. Whatever Freya's power was going to be, she hadn't developed it when Gwen told them about it.

Was the same true for him?

If that was so, Harold thought he knew what his power was.

It explained why he had insisted on the truth of Gwen's prophecy. It explained why he had felt that Donna's thirteenth birthday was significant, even though he still didn't know what effect it had had on events.

He had the Sight. It was the only explanation he could think of.

And that realisation brought with it a terrible fear, one which he desperately tried to keep from Donna, because if a prophecy from two years ago came true completely then a dream from last night could not possibly be changed. There was nothing he could do.

_Freya's going to die soon._


	30. OutofBody Experience

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**30: Out-of-Body Experience**

The only thing she could compare it to was being underwater.

She could see a long way, in every direction, but there was very little to see. She stood on a flat, dark surface, and around and above her the colours swirled: every imaginable shade of blue, with many other colours interwoven between them. The ever-rippling blues were her first reason to compare it to water.

She could hear nothing.

There was no sound at all in this place. That too was like being underwater, and she enjoyed it.

But along with the colour and the silence came the pressure, and that felt like water too. Metres and metres of water, pressing down on her, until it was a struggle to stand upright under the weight of it all.

_So don't stand upright. Lie down and let it all wash over you._

It was tempting.

But if she lay down now, she knew she would never be able to get up again.

To distract herself from the crippling pressure, she fixed her eyes on one colour among the swirling mass - a tranquil, shimmering green - and watched it as it moved. It shifted shape as well as position, darting over and under the other colours to form part of a constantly changing pattern.

But around her, for a small distance in all directions, there was only blue. As the other colours came close, they slowed down, and then drifted away again.

When the green that she had been watching was close to her, she made up her mind. She reached out with one hand, slowly, pushing through the blue, forcing her way on…

She touched the green.

_Lucy's face, staring past her, out of the window, unseeing, thinking about something else, something not entirely pleasant -_

The green moved away from her hand, and the connection was broken.

Curious now, she reached for another colour - a bright, steely grey.

_The sound of cars, vans, all sorts of traffic, moving up and down the road outside…_

This time, she consciously pulled her hand out of the colour to end the sensations. Next, she tried a rich, dark purple.

_The soft, squashy feeling of the bed she was sitting on, sinking a little beneath her weight, and the stiffness in muscles which had not moved for a long time..._

Slowly, she began to understand.

Each colour brought a sensation - a touch of reality. They built up together into a bigger picture. Sitting on a bed, very still, watching Lucy Cole's face, hearing the traffic on the road…

The traffic was audible through the window. The same window that Lucy was looking at.

They were connected.

Somewhere this was really happening. Somewhere she was sitting, and listening, and watching. And at the same time she was here, standing, staring, touching colours, in silence.

For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder who she was.

Who _was_ the girl who sat on the bed beside Lucy?

And if she was the girl, why did she feel as if she was _here_, in this strange watery world? Shouldn't she be on that bed, as the sensations in the colours told her she was?

The colours.

She reached out and up, with both her hands, trying to touch as many as she could at the same time. And suddenly she _was_ there, in the small, dingy room she recognised for the first time as a hotel room, sitting on the bed. Lucy was beside her in a chair, in front of the window, staring out of it…

She tried to turn her head, to look the other way, to find the door of the room -

Abruptly, she was back underwater. She had been forced back, the moment she tried to control her body: forced in a way that made it clear it was impossible to do so.

But surely she _ought_ to be able to move. This was her body. This was _herself_.

She was separated from herself.

She didn't even know who she was.

She touched a strand of gold and felt her body move without her command - a strange, helpless feeling. She wasn't in control, and she hated it.

Something else was controlling her body.

And she was trapped here, unable to do anything about it.

The colours.

They gave her back some of her control. Enough to experience who she was, if not to change anything.

And none of the colours were touching her, unless she made an effort to touch them herself. Above her, they swirled constantly; around her, they formed ever-changing patterns. The only space without them was the space she was in.

_If this is like water,_ she thought suddenly, _maybe it's time I started to swim._

She pushed off from the bottom, aiming straight up, through the mass of blue to the colours beyond it. She wasn't sure if she had any shape in this strange world, but she pictured herself swimming upwards, and felt herself rising faster.

The plain blue area elongated as she rose, so that she was still trapped in it. She pulled through the substance faster, kicked imaginary legs hard.

She could see the edge, the line dividing colours and blue. It was golden - a bright, shining gold. Golden like the colour which had shown her lack of control to her.

Golden like the dream which had started it all.

She forced herself on.

Golden light…

Singing…

A brief instant of disorientation, where she didn't know where she was or what she was doing…

And for one glorious moment she was submerged in the colours, and back in her own body, and knew who she was.

Freya.

Freya Jennifer Smith.

And then the golden light rose again, forcing her out - away - down - inwards -

_Freya._

_My name is Freya._

She crumpled to the floor in a place that did not exist.

She was imprisoned inside her own mind.

_Freya_, she whispered, but her voice was silent.


	31. Wrong

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**AN: **I apologise for the lateness of the chapter. I had a short story to complete, and then my internet went down.

**31: Wrong**

Harold frowned in concentration. Something had happened, he was sure of it, and it was nothing good.

Something was wrong.

Was that the best he could do? Concentrating further, he tried to isolate the source of this _wrongness_. Was it wrong for the world in general, or wrong for him in particular?

Wrong for his family, he realised grimly. And, if it wasn't stopped, possibly wrong for the rest of the world as well.

_No,_ he thought suddenly, _not just wrong for my family. Wrong for Freya._

Something had happened to Freya.

Desperately he tried to work out what. But it was no use. All he knew was that it was… _wrong_.

* * *

The future had _changed_.

The vision had come to Lucy when she didn't expect it. Staring out of the window and thinking of the past, she had at first not realised that her thoughts had turned to the future, that what she was seeing now was a vision and not a memory.

Then she had realised what she was Seeing.

She had closed her eyes tightly, clamped her hands over them, trying frantically to ignore it, forget it, pretend it wasn't happening. But the vision had seared itself onto the insides of her eyelids, and she had been forced to watch it play out to its conclusion.

And it was impossible.

She wouldn't do it. She _couldn't _do it.

But she would, and she could, and she had to, because the visions were always true.

_Freya doesn't resist as she is led out of the hotel. Lucy grips her hand tightly - just in case - but Freya walks calmly beside her, as if nothing is wrong._

_They walk together, hand in hand, through the city of Cardiff, heading for the Bay area._

Like a mother and daughter, Lucy thought now, thinking over it.

But Freya could never be her daughter, not now.

_Lucy leads Freya to the Roald Dahl Plass, towards the water tower. There, in front of it, they stop, and she lets go of Freya's hand at last._

_She looks Freya in the eyes, and Freya stares back at her. Her face is calm, uncaring._

She is better at this than I am, Lucy realised. I am too emotional. This has to happen, so why do I protest? Freya must know, but she is not afraid.

_Lucy finds her voice. "It has to be this way," she says. Her voice is steady and clear._

No tears, thought Lucy. I don't cry, then. I let it happen.

"_I'm sorry," says Freya. "I'm so, so sorry."_

_The Rift opens._

_Through the pain, Lucy keeps her eyes fixed on Freya._

_She watches dispassionately as the girl she once called daughter vanishes into the storms of Time._

"No!" sobbed Lucy, abandoning all attempts to stay objective as a Seer should. "Please… not Freya! Not my _daughter_!"

But there will be another daughter, she realised, for she had Seen that, too. She had thought that Freya was that girl, but that was impossible now.

This had to happen.

It _would_ happen.

Freya Smith was staring at Lucy. Her eyes were emotionless, devoid of expression.

"It has to happen," Freya told her.

A fresh sob broke from Lucy's lips.

This was _wrong_. It wasn't _meant_ to happen.

Except it was, because the visions never lied.

* * *

They were in Cardiff now, and their parents had gone to talk to Suzie Costello about something. Harold and Donna were alone with their thoughts.

The same thoughts kept running through Harold's mind, over and over again.

Freya was in trouble.

Freya was his little sister.

He had to help her.

He didn't know how.

Donna was looking over at him worriedly. "Harry?" she asked cautiously. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing!" he answered hurriedly. _Nothing nothing nothing nothing _he repeated in his mind. Donna knew he was hiding something; that wasn't important, not really. All that mattered was making sure she didn't find out _what_ he was hiding. He couldn't do that to her. Not after what he knew about -

No, best not to even think about it either, just in case.

_Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing…_

It was so _difficult_ trying to think of only one thing!

"You don't have to tell me," said Donna softly. Harold risked a glance at her. She was determinedly not looking in his direction. "But - I just want to know what's wrong."

_Something's wrong with Freya._

It was only association that made him think it. Donna had used the one word which Harold had chosen to describe the feeling, at a moment when his concentration was failing, and the thought had flashed through his mind involuntarily.

And from the confusion in her eyes, he could tell Donna had seen at least part of that flash of thought, although she had tried not to.

"What did you… see?" he ventured.

Donna had closed her eyes tightly so that she wouldn't accidentally see anything else. "Something about Freya?" she tried, confused still as to what she had actually seen.

Silence.

"Harold… It's not Freya. Remember? We agreed… Gwen couldn't possibly have been warning us about our own sister!"

"I know." He wasn't so sure, not really. But it couldn't be Freya, surely. She was _family_.

"I didn't know she was going to leave," Donna admitted shakily. "Did you know that? She just left, and I didn't get any warning from her mind. Maybe it was just a spur of the moment decision, but if not -" She broke off and started again.

"Harold, you - well, everyone, really - seems to think I'm infallible, or omniscient, or something. _I'm not!_ Dad's taught me everything he can, but I'm thirteen years old! I make mistakes!" She took a deep breath and kept going, although Harold had been about to say something. "If Freya was planning to leave, then I never knew. I could have stopped her, if I'd known. Or helped her. I don't know which. _But I didn't, because I couldn't_. If she had plans, she hid them from me. And now you're hiding something important…" She seemed about to open her eyes, but kept them closed with an effort. "Harry, I only want to help you. I'll keep your secret, whatever it is. But - I can't _stand_ not knowing what's going on!"

Harold snorted. "That's how the rest of us feel all the time, you know," he said, trying to make a joke of it - but this wasn't the time for humour.

"Harry," whispered Donna. "Will you let me see?"

He hesitated.

"Please?"

"You can't tell _anyone_," he warned. She nodded solemnly.

But could he even tell Donna? Tell her that their little sister was going to die? Could he do that to her?

_She might know how to save her._

"I -" he began, but he couldn't say it. "I'm sorry, I -"

Donna opened her eyes, very slowly. "Let me in, Harry," she whispered. Her eyes were large and dark, and they bored into his with a fierce intensity. "Let me _see_."

And she _looked_.

He felt her spinning through his mind, searching out his secrets, seeing _everything_, even those parts of him which were hidden from his conscious mind. She had told him she wasn't omniscient, but at that moment she was, at least as far as Harold was concerned.

And then she blinked, and her eyes were normal again, not that distant stare that was the _look_. Normal, and emotional, and filled with… relief?

"It's not the Sight!" she gasped. "Harry, it's alright, you haven't got the Sight! That dream was just a dream!"

Harold felt the same relief flooding through him. Freya was alright!


	32. Something You're Not Telling Me

**Disclaimer: **see previous chapter.

**AN: **This is where all the hints from previous chapters come together. Everything was included for a reason!

**32: Something You're Not Telling Me**

Harold's relief was short-lived.

"What do you mean?" he asked in confusion. "How can I not have the Sight? That dream, and all those inexplicable feelings… There _is_ something wrong with Freya, I can tell, and what's that if not the Sight?"

"A sort of… _time-sense,_ I suppose," Donna replied slowly. "The dream wasn't important, just something your subconscious invented. We can forget about the dream. But that feeling… that's real. I'm sure of it."

"Time-sense?" Donna wasn't making it any clearer to Harold. He had to admit, though, that he was relieved to be able to put the dream aside.

"So," he continued, working it out as he spoke, "you're saying something _is_ wrong with Freya, and it's… to do with time?"

"_Everything's _to do with Time," Donna confirmed. "Harry, once I knew what was going on in your head, everything made sense!"

"Well, so far none of it's making sense to me."

He didn't mean to sound so annoyed. It just slipped out. But Donna was deadly serious now, and she didn't seem to notice.

"Gwen Cooper knew what the Rift was capable of. She knew there would be no way of stopping it. And she knew that the first place to be destroyed would be Cardiff. Her home."

"Something terrible is going to happen," Harold murmured, remembering Gwen's words. That had been two years ago and he still remembered every one of them.

"Something too terrible to think about," Donna agreed. "So she made herself forget."

"And now it's happening."

"Two years later." Donna sighed. "Causality just doesn't work like that! Time's in flux - well, you'd know more about that than I would. But the point is, Gwen's only human. Her prophecy was one possible future out of thousands. Some things come true, that's to be expected, but _all_ of them?" Donna looked almost frightened. "That prophecy's coming true. Word for word. And that's just not meant to happen!"

"And the Rift… spreading… That's got to affect Time, too."

"Yes," admitted Donna awkwardly. "The Rift." There were some things she wasn't going to tell anyone, not even Harold.

And Harold had his own worries. It was all very well being told that he could discount the dream, but there was still something wrong with Freya, something wrong with the Rift, and something wrong with Time. And besides…

The first time he'd had a _feeling_, or in other words the first time his time-sense had stirred, had been on Donna's thirteenth birthday. He thought now that that might have had something to do with a condition in another prophecy being fulfilled. But back then, he'd decided it was "something he'd realised subconsciously but not consciously", and in a way he supposed it had been. After all, he hadn't known about his time-sense then, and he hadn't been trying to find out anything.

And that dream, like all dreams, had been an invention of his subconscious mind. Donna had just more or less admitted it, after all.

And Captain Jack had been in it, and Captain Jack was _wrong_; that was what his father had said. Had he subconsciously associated the problems he was sensing in Time with Captain Jack?

Was Freya really going to die?

* * *

"Why did we have to wait outside?" demanded Harold, when John came to fetch them into the Torchwood base. "We've seen it all before."

"I didn't want Suzie to know about Freya," John replied darkly. "We're going to handle this one ourselves. As a family."

"What did you do with Suzie, then?" asked Donna.

"Sent her and her team into the Brecons, of course!" John replied. "I still need to know how far the Rift's spreading, even though we've got other things on our minds at the moment."

"They might both be connected," said Donna cautiously.

The two told their father their theory, each one interrupting the other in an attempt to bring the most important points to his attention.

"Time-sense?" repeated John. "Harold, you're brilliant!"

They ran back into the base, where John explained the whole thing over again to Rose, in a slightly more coherent way.

"We have to assume Lucy Cole's mixed up with the Rift spreading, too. She might have set it off, she might not, but she knows about it and she isn't doing anything to stop it. What Donna said Melissa said Lucy said…" he trailed off for a moment in an attempt to work out what he was saying, and then continued, "about the destruction in Cardiff being meant to happen… If Harold's right and there's another prophecy involved too, then she must know about that one; she might even have made it. If there's something temporally wrong with Freya, then Lucy must be the one who took her."

"And what are we going to do about it?" asked Rose.

He grinned suddenly. "It's a good thing we got rid of the Gamma team. Human seers get their power from the Rift, and my guess is Lucy's abusing her power, keeping all of Time on a course that suits her. So…" He looked round at the others expectantly.

"We close the Rift," said Rose, grinning.

"Exactly!" John agreed. "Now then, what do we have? Rift manipulator, computers, miscellaneous alien tech, time-sense… Harold, focus for me a minute." Abruptly he was more serious. "There should be a point, sometime soon, where events can go in two ways, either we win or we lose. _When is it?_"

"Maybe…" Harold frowned in concentration. "Fairly soon… Within the next twelve hours. I think. I could be wrong."

"Come on then, everybody, we've got a Rift to close!"

"Donna and I'll go and look at the alien tech," said Harold, and dragged his sister down to the archives area. Once they were there, he turned to face Donna, looking serious.

"There's something you're not telling me."

She nodded grimly. "Do you really want to know what it is?"

"I asked you the same question not so long ago," Harold retorted. "There are no secrets between us, Donna."

She sighed. "Lucy Cole is benefitting from the Rift spreading. She might even be encouraging it. It's opening, slowly… but _she didn't open it_."

"Then who did?" Was there another enemy they didn't even know they were facing?

Donna was close to tears. "We did."

"No!"

"_Beware of your family,_ Harry. That was what it meant."

"But… _how?_"

"After the Shuk, when Mum was killed… that night I had a dream. A dream about Gallifrey."

Harold froze. "But… so did I."

"And the next day, Freya was tired; she said she'd slept badly."

"All three of us had the same dream?"

"We did." Donna looked haunted. "It was after that that your time-sense began to develop. You didn't notice it at first, but it was there. And the only explanation I can think of is that the Rift started to open then."

"I'll check Gamma's records," said Harold shakily. "We need to be _sure_. But… don't tell Mum or Dad, ok?"

"Of course not," Donna agreed. "And most _definitely_ do not tell Freya!"

* * *

As soon as the children had disappeared down the steps which led to the archives, Rose turned to John, who was busy doing something to the Rift manipulator.

"You said close, not seal."

"Since when were you so pedantic?" He didn't look up from the coloured wires he had pulled out from the base.

"There's something you're not telling me."

This time he turned to look at her, but still said nothing.

"You _sealed_ the rift at the Medusa Cascade. It never opened again."

"I can't do that again," he admitted. "Not now, not like this. I had a TARDIS then. More importantly, I was a full Time Lord."

"There's Harold -"

"His time-sense is barely there. It's only just started developing." He fixed her with a stare. "But I'm going to do this, Rose. I may not be able to seal the Rift, but I can close it, return it to its original proportions. It won't be a danger any more. Torchwood Gamma will be able to contain it just like they used to."

"And if you can't?"

"I can," he said, more confidently than he felt. "I can, and I will."


	33. Belief

**Disclaimer: **I don't own anything you recognise.

**33: Belief**

"How?"

"What do you mean?" asked Donna, resolutely not looking up from the assorted space junk in front of her, hoping her brother would let the subject drop.

"You know what I mean."

Of course she did, but could he blame her for wanting to avoid the subject? He was doing the same, really: refusing to say it aloud, as if that would somehow mean it wasn't true. He'd checked the records, though; he knew it had happened. And he always had to know all the facts.

_How could three children break open a rift in time and space?_

The question hung, unspoken, in the air between them.

"In telepathy," Donna said finally, "do you know what the most important thing is? Belief. If you _believe_ you can do something - and if your willpower's strong enough - then you can do it. If you don't know that something's impossible, it isn't."

She fell silent. Harold was silent too. Waiting.

"I don't normally remember my dreams," she said next.

Harold blinked at the non sequitur, but his sister continued.

"I suppose I should've known it'd be important, but… The ones I do remember, they tend to be about Dad's past, and… I didn't think it was anything special. I don't know. We'd had an emotional day. Maybe my control isn't as good as I think it is. It always slips a bit in my sleep anyway."

"So you pulled me and Freya into your dream accidentally."

Harold knew her well enough to guess what she had been going to say, and even to jump to a conclusion which she had been avoiding. Sometimes Donna wished he didn't.

"Probably," she admitted. "It might not have been _my_ dream, but we all ended up having the _same_ dream, which must have been my doing."

"A dream about Gallifrey."

"Yes… Gallifrey." Now she looked up, for the first time in this awkward conversation, and met his eyes. "Do you want to see it?"

"Gallifrey? Of course." He didn't have to think about it; his answer was obvious to him. "Why? Don't you?"

Donna sighed. "Of course I do. That was what that dream was about, you know. I want all three of us to see Gallifrey - just once."

Another pause. Harold had worked out what she was doing now. She had jumped straight to a possible answer, realised intuitively that it was the right one, but didn't know how she'd got there. Now she was working backwards, filling in all the gaps.

"Of course you want to see Gallifrey, once you've thought of it," she continued distantly. "But you just haven't really thought about it - about what that means. I'm sure Freya's the same. And if you're offered an opportunity - you don't _question_ it. Especially not in a dream."

"You've lost me," Harold admitted.

"Is it possible, getting to Gallifrey?" she demanded.

"No."

"Were you thinking that when you were dreaming about it?"

"No," he replied, and realised what she was talking about. "I didn't know it was impossible! Like you just said!"

"It didn't even cross your mind!" She made it sound ridiculous. Despite himself, he smiled.

"What about you?" he asked. "Did you know it couldn't be done?"

"In theory, yes." She smiled wryly. "I knew it was in a whole other universe, and inside a time-lock, but… I'm a mind-reader, Harry! My dad's an _alien_! I didn't believe in _impossible_!"

"Didn't?" Harold, ever the pedant, picked up on that one word, where most would have overlooked it. "Past tense?"

"We had the belief," Donna answered slowly. "All three of us together - because _you_ overthink everything, so if you didn't see it Freya definitely wouldn't've. Belief and willpower, that's what it takes - enough to reach through the Rift, to try and force our minds into another universe… well, we managed that part, anyway. But breaking a time-lock? It might as well be impossible, the strength of mind it'd take to actually _do_ it! It'll never happen!"

"So instead, we woke up feeling cheated and forgot to close the Rift behind us," Harold completed, deliberately turning it into a joke.

"Exactly," agreed Donna, and tried to smile, but it was strained.

The conversation apparently over, Donna turned back to the artefacts. She was looking for things she recognised from her parents' memories, but she'd never really paid much attention to that sort of thing.

Harold joined her, and for a while they worked together without speaking. They found several things they could identify, but nothing that might be useful.

Eventually, Harold broke the silence.

"If we opened the Rift… surely we'd be able to close it again?"

"In theory, yes." Now it was Donna's turn to be pedantic, because Harold had phrased it as a question, which meant he wasn't sure he could do it. But she didn't mention it aloud, all the same.

"Only in theory?"

"We'd need Freya, for a start. If she was here - our minds are strong enough. But… do you think we could do it, though? Really?"

And that was the problem.

Harold reached out with his mind, in that newly-discovered way he still didn't understand, finding that indefinable event which would nevertheless define the course of the future.

It was close. Too close for comfort.

After that event, there were two possible ways in which the world could continue. If they managed to stop it, everything continued as normal.

And if they failed, Time would tear itself apart.

How could three children stand against something like that?

"Belief," said Donna sadly. "That's all it takes - belief. But if we don't think we can do it -"

"Then we can't."

The siblings turned back to the alien tech, hoping desperately that they would find something that would be of help, since there was no other way they could undo their mistake.


End file.
